Quotes About Authors

People often ask authors where their ideas come from, and often authors say they don't know. But I do know about this one. Once upon a time, my wife and I had three small children -- two boys and a girl, just like in the story. And when they were young, we used to tell them a story very like YOU'RE ALL MY FAVORITES.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

Many books owe their success to the good memories of their authors and the bad memories of their readers.

Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

Some authors have conceptualized depression as a "depletion syndrome" because of the prominence of fatigability; they postulate that the patient exhausts his available energy during the period prior to the onset of the depression and that the depressed state represents a kind of hibernation, during which the patient gradually builds up a new story of energy.

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??

There is little disagreement on our planet that the lives of most human beings could be improved immensely. Words pour out of lecturers, articles pour out of magazines, and books pour out of authors, all seeking to help us understand how we can have more peace, security, health, opportunity, happiness, fulfillment, abundance, and love.

Over against the devil and his missionaries, the authors of false doctrines and sects, we ought to be like the Apostle, impatient, and rigorously condemnatory, as parents are with the dog that bites their little one, but the weeping child itself they soothe.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

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.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

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.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

One of my favorite authors, Garbrielle Zevin, she did a book called 'Elsewhere,' that is one of my favorites, and I think they're making that into a movie too. I really want to be in that one just because the story is so beautiful.

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.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

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.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.

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.

Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago.

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

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

I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.

Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

You have a very open relationship with your fans." "Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.

My role is to promote the authors image and their new books. I'm also brought on board when the author is "between books" to keep the name in front of the reading public. That's a challenging time for an author.

When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority.

I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.

Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

All great authors are seers.

There are so many good authors; there's no shortage of them.

The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.

I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.

Favourite directors change, like favorite authors. I had a passion for Gide and Stein and Faulkner. But now they're no use to me anymore. I've assimilated them - so, enough, they are a closed chapter. This also applies to film directors.

The great British Library --an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.

I have wanted to write from a young age, but working with so many gifted authors and editors over the years has taught me so much. I doubt I would be where I am today without that amazing experience.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.