Author Quotes

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Oh, I think every author is inspired by all of the books that she reads.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.

An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

My biggest accomplishment has been making a transition from athlete to author.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by 500 readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the 500, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors.