Author Quotes

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

The author knows just what he wants to illustrate and how he would like it to be done.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

I shall be but a shrimp of an author.

Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.

Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.

The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced.

Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.

Well, you know, Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence said he wouldn't have any atheists in his cabinet because atheists wouldn't swear an oath to God. That was Jefferson and we have never had any Muslims in the cabinet.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.