Author Quotes

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

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.

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.

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I think it's always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod's distance from the actual moviemaking.

In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

An author departs, he does not die.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!

My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am the freest author in the world.