Authors Quotes

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

~ Christopher Rice

Grayson: Fiction is just a lie anyway.Brianna: But it's not - it's a different kind of truth - it would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?

~ Nora Roberts

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

~ John Gardner

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

~ Arundhati Roy

I became a feminist upon the realization that, whether physical, mental, or emotional, everything involved in obtaining love and approval from men required some form of self-mutilation.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

If you call yourself an authoress on your Facebook profile, you suck at life. You are stupid and your children are ugly. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to be cute and original. You're not. You are about as original as all those other witless twits writing the one millionth shitty Fifty Shades clone. Or maybe you're trying to show your 2000 fake Facebook friends that you are an empowered feminist who will not stand for sexist terminology. But you're not showing people that you are fighting the good fight, you're showing people that you are a sheep, who's trying just a little too hard to ride the current wave of idiotic political correctness. The word author is no more gender-discrimination than the word person. Do you call yourself a personess? No, of course not, because then you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, Hello, I'm a retard.

~ Oliver Markus

You -have- to love your monster.

~ Philippa Dowding

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without writers, stories would not be written,Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

~ Angie-Marie Delsante

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time.Bacon is also an acceptable restorative.

~ Michelle Franklin

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

~ Lev Grossman

Jack Kerouac died after throwing up blood. The malt liquor. Then that other guy who shot his wife in the head. Burroughs somebody. And I wonder about literary figures. They're all drunk and staggering and haunting people today, I bet, still muttering and ranting in disassociated lines.Or, I'm wondering about a middle ground with wooly blankets and nubbly cardigans and nobody shot in the head. Where yes, you are uniquely mad. But functionally uniquely mad. Endlessly absorbed but in the mildly scattered kind of way instead of in the crap-I-shot-my-wife-in-the-head kind of way. Unable to dedicate to another human being only in occasional fits.Roald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom but then I'm not so sure about that. He bought a wagon from a Romanian gypsy and his kids played in it and I think he had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if he reached a point where his own point no longer applied to him. He had no master except his own soul, and that, he was sure, was why he did it.

~ Kate Inglis

Many believe creativity is mystery, and I always knew that my body is the key.

~ Lara Biyuts

Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something--a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question—-ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness.

~ Nadine C. Keels

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

~ Neil Gaiman

Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Say something worthwhile and people will listen.

~ Germany Kent

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

~ Joan Didion

Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

~ Mary Karr

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

~ Ben Lerner

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

~ A.k. Kuykendall

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

~ Dermot Davis

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

~ Dermot Davis

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

i would rather havefeelings without wordsthan words without feelings.

~ Sanober Khan

Writers are like tricksters. Their words lure us to embark on journeys and unlock our emotions.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

As individuals, great writers from Villon to Diderot to Voltaire toRousseau to Byron or Shelley have often shown themselves to beirresponsible, selfish, mean or sometimes even cowardly people. Their lives were drab or self destructive or reckless.We read them for their Words, not for their deeds.

~ Max Vegaritter

One piece of wisdom a writer quickly learns ~ typos keep you humble.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.

~ Shannon L. Alder

A strong positive mind is an unbreakable shield against all negative forces and experiences. It never bargains for anything that goes against its true destiny in life. It sees life as an inevitable journey of happiness and success in abundance. Therefore, you should make it your daily ritual to introduce your subconscious mind to some deep inspirational and motivational quotes and sayings from great inspiring and uplifting deep self-help authors. Positive words and beliefs are the core foundation of a positive life.

~ Hafiz

Authors are the closest thing man would come to understanding God. It is a remarkable thing to conjure up a life and create its story.

~ Palle Oswald

Book sense makes sense because someone has gone through it before and able to share it with you. Your job is to listen and discern.

~ Germany Kent

...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

~ Ettore Scola