Quotes About Authors

It's easy to sell good news like this, and the authors confidently rely on classic fallacious arguments. They argue by declaration, which is what makes the books so amusing. In matter-of-fact, authoritative tones, the authors tell us how plants and human beings exchange energy - or they describe what angels look like, whether or how they're sexed, how they communicate with human beings, and how they differ from ghosts. Readers might be expected to wonder, How do they know?

All the authors who've ultimately published Louder Than Words memoirs have been very happy to be chosen and excited about the possibility of having their memoir published. Even though these books deal with serious, often painful, issues, in all cases the authors felt as though writing their story would be an empowering and healing experience.

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.

Living authors, therefore, are usually, bad companions. If they have not gained character, they seek to do so by methods often ridiculous, always disgusting; and if they have established a character, they are silent for fear of losing by their tongue what they have acquired by their pen--for many authors converse much more foolishly than Goldsmith, who have never written half so well.

Of course, there are hundreds of novels and authors that have influenced me. But to choose three, they are: Stephen King/The Stand (and really most of his books); Anne Rice/The Witching Hour; and Pat Conroy/The Prince of Tides. These authors write my favorite kind of book - epic feel, gorgeous prose, unique characters, and a pace that keeps you turning the pages. From them, I learned a lot about characterization, pacing, prose, voice, and originality.

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.

It was considered very bad form to wish authors on their birthdays 'many happy returns.

The one thing all famous authors, world class athletes, business tycoons, singers, actors, and celebrated achievers in any field have in common is that they all began their journeys when they were none of these things.

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.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

I think it's more difficult now to write a spy thriller with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many authors have tried, but few have succeeded in capturing the interest of readers.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

I thought it was amazing to work with authors, to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.

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.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

For years, I'd say yes to almost everything, trying to be nice and generous. Feeling obliged to be of service to the world. Maybe also a fear of being forgotten if I don't. But I paid the ultimate price in doing that, because for all those years, I got almost no work done! Some famous authors have written about this: that if they said yes to every request, then they'd never have time to write another book again.

Books have always been living things to me. Some of my encounters with new authors have changed my life a little. When I have been perplexed, looking for something I could not define to myself, a certain book has turned up, approached me as a friend would. And between it's cover carried the questions and the answers I was looking for.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

With every literary genre or form come some conventional expectations that the biblical authors either follow or deviate from.

[Confiscating a book and punishing its author] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think . . .

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.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

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 must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.

...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant. May you always be so.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

...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.

A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."

Amazon has included me in an opportunity to provide top-shelf television-style programming live on the world's computer screens. To hold forth with the industry's very best actors, directors, musicians, authors - I'm thrilled to be on the cutting edge of this.

I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.

It's interesting, editing can be so immersive for me that I've noticed that the authors I edit have a pretty profound effect on how I hear language for a while.

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers.

Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.

The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.

In old days the public didn't really mind much about accuracy, but nowadays readers take it upon themselves to write to authors on every possible occasion, pointing out flaws.