Quotes About Authors

At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

Some authors state that the last stage in this chain of measurements involves "consciousness," or the "intellectual inner life" of the observer, by virtue of the "principle of psycho-physical parallelism." Other authors introduce a wave function for the entire universe. In this book, I shall refrain from using concepts that I do not understand.

What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.

Under true peer-review...a panel of reviewers must accept a study before it can be published in a scientific journal. If the reviewers have objections the author must answer them or change the article to take reviewers' objections into account. Under the IPCC review process, the authors are at liberty to ignore criticisms.

I think that when you pay tribute and are citing, not only through naming the authors but also through the acknowledgement of the form, that you are in no way plagiarizing.

Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers - and at some point the distinction should become meaningless.

Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.

The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??

Am I in love? Absolutely. I'm in love with ancient philosophers, foreign painters, classic authors, and musicians who have died long ago. I'm a passionate lover. I fawn over these people. I have given them my heart and my soul. The trouble is, I'm unable to love anyone tangible. I have sacrificed a physical bond, for a metaphysical relationship. I am the ultimate idealistic lover.

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.

Also, there are authors and publicists using the Internet to manipulate opinion, both positively for a work and negatively against the competition. I don't do this and can't stomach it, honestly.

Let us hope that good authors who are bad Christians will find salvation through the books they write.

For them (the peoples of the Soviet Union) We cherish the warmest paternal affection. We are well aware that not a few of them groan beneath the yoke imposed on them by men who in very large part are strangers to the real interests of the country. We recognize that many others were deceived by fallacious hopes. We blame only the system with its authors and abettors who considered Russia the best field for experimenting with a plan elaborated years ago, and who from there continue to spread it from one of the world to the other.

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

As the moon, though darkened with spots, gives us a much greater light than the stars that sewn all-luminous, so do the Scriptures afford more light than the brightest human authors. In them the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance.

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.

I find it interesting that authors of fantasy and science fiction novels are rarely asked if their books are based on their personal experiences, because all writing is based on personal experience. I may not have gone on an epic quest through a haunted forest, but the feelings in my books are often based on feelings I've had. Real-life events, in fantasy and science fiction, can take on metaphorical significance that they can't in a so-called realistic novel.

One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.

Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites.

I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

For almost a quarter of a century, Teen Ink has been encouraging young people to write - and then has published those pieces. These heartfelt essays and poems explore the issues faced by teenagers today. I applaud their efforts because they not only help young people deal with their own lives but also encourage the budding authors of the next generation.

Authors of published papers and editors of scientific journals can, unfortunately, be slow to come to terms with criticism, and it's good that we can use blogs to express specific criticisms of published articles and to use social media to disseminate these criticisms.

Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness count for something. The fun of reading is not that something is told to you, but that you stretch your mind. Your own imagination works along with the authors, or even goes beyond his, yields the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.

I have dear friends in South Carolina, folks who made my life there wonderful and meaningful. Two of my children were born there. South Carolina's governor awarded me the highest award for the arts in the state. I was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. I have lived and worked among the folks in Sumter, South Carolina, for so many years. South Carolina has been home, and to be honest, it was easier for me to define myself as a South Carolinian than even as an American.

Once the initial excitement wears off and it's time to sit down to write, the authors are usually still very eager, but the reality of doing the work can be a little daunting.

I was simply writing out our family stories in my online journal, scratching out what I want to remember, what I was wrestling out with God. Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

I, too, am deeply concerned with an overarching idea that dramaturgs are now authors . . .. I am not taking the position that all dramaturgs own copyright, deserve special billing credit, or should receive remuneration akin to that of the playwright. I know from my ears at the Dramatists Guild that almost everyone a writer encounters has suggestions of how to write and rewrite the play or musical to make it work.

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere.

I started to read James Baldwin very early on in my life. At a time, as a young adult in the Sixties, when there were not that many authors in whom I could recognize myself, he was an important guide and mentor to me as he was to many others. He helped me understand who I was and decipher the world around me. He gave me the words to defend myself and the argumentative rhetoric to master discussions with others.

I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognised by the world.

How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

I am one of those authors who believes (perhaps foolishly) that she is in complete control of the story.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

All great authors are seers.

I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily.

Few authors are so interesting as their work - they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.