Authors Quotes

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.(on Ernest Hemingway

~ William Faulkner

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

~ Andrew Clements

True Devdas are Authors

~ Santosh Avvannavar

If you are working with authors, you are accepting a great responsibility and must tread very carefully. The author's work is a part of herself, a creative endeavor she has poured her heart and soul into. Protecting and nurturing that work and the author is part of the job of a publisher.

~ Terena Scott

Authors, reviews are not for you. They are not for you. Authors, reviews are not for you.

~ Stacia Kane

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

~ Dan Brown

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

~ Libba Bray

Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.

~ David A. Santos

An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.

~ Sterling Lord

I've always said Writer's Block is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.

~ Julie Ann Dawson

Some men are born to be good some born to be badAs for me I only came with just a pen ‘n’ a pad.

~ Carlos Salinas

I know one thing for sho Heaven’s gotta have a ghettoCuz where else in death do I get to go?

~ Carlos Salinas

Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

~ Alan Hollinghurst

You'll be amazed how much you have in common with Edith Wharton (who struggled to feel worthy of success), Louisa May Alcott (who badly needed money), Madaleine L'Engle (who could have papered an entire house with her rejection letters) and other writers...

~ Nava Atlas

Writing is a conduit. It opens up a passageway into the past. Not just for the writer, but for the reader too. Both readers and writer are linked by the commonality of human experience.

~ Lang Leav

I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket! But I got a little tired of the redundancy.

~ Natasha Tsakos

I am inspired to write, and I write to inspire.

~ R.l. Hemlock

I'll just say right here that whoever thought up the idea of paying dead white authors by the word should have a special place in hell with the rest of the sadists.

~ Heather W. Petty

Author visits are a fun way to engage kids, and encourage reading!

~ Carmela Dutra

If you like a book you read, tell someone. If you hate it, tell em harder.

~ J.d. Mader

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

~ Joshua Cohen

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything, and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates.

~ Sarah Vowell

A hint: perhaps in this case, you should refrain from throwing the book at the audience when you finish.

~ Annie Barrows

The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.

~ Conrad Williams

Imagination must be allowed to run free in our subconscious mind and when ready, it reveals its ideals to us in our conscious state.

~ Lee Bice-Matheson

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

~ Mary Gaitskill

Most people don't read books, but when they do, mine are the first, and that's enough for me.

~ Daniel Marques

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

~ Samuel Johnson

Authors have to help each other out. It isn't a competition, we're all holding hands to cross the street here.

~ Marie Krepps

I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.

~ Rick Moody

The biggest threat to authors in this age is not plagiarism or poverty, it's obscurity

~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

Bernard of Clairvaux shared with Goethe and Balzac the art of charging narratives with his own charisma (and this is probably the only context in which those three names can be mentioned in one breath). On the surface self-representation was not the purpose of such narratives; they presented themselves as fiction or as commentaries on scripture. Let me suggest the word 'autography' to describe the process. 'Autography' is writing yourself into your own composition, not by describing yourself, but by infusing your own presence into it. The reader feels your presence, but sees someone or something else.

~ C. Stephen Jaeger

And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Going by Dr. Marriott's description, Zoe imagined it to be small and elegant as she peered into dozens of shelves, rummaging through the contents. There were globes and charts and atlases, pocket watches and hand-painted Indian silk, gold-plated cutlery, litter coffers of spice, inlaid combs, silver fasteners, trinket boxes, blown-glass figurines, turn-of-the-century postcards with foreign stamps, and portraits of Victorian authors in elaborate frames. But nowhere did she discover a stone of any kind, with or without runes.

~ Christine Brodien-Jones

It's a sad day when your iPhone becomes a horcrux, witches hunt your soul and you have to seek the resurrection stone just to find yourself. I was hardly Harry Potter. There was no lightening bolt on my forehead, but if you knew my life you would have met a storm.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Authors can alter your life.

~ Bernard Kelvin Clive