Author Quotes

The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. N...

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageou...

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily...

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.

I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a s...

For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always...

We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mir...

London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate)...

When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'...

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I ...

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a ...

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. ...

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, r...

A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writ...

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way...

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superfi...

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.

If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no dee...

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers,...

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy ...

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hand...

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just ...

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer ...

Nerd life is just so much better than regular life.

All writing is rewriting.

Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I...

Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'...

We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a n...

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves ...

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad read...

Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as ...

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day goin...

I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a ...

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting t...

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on ...

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a des...

It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of ...

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we h...

Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sa...

The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill...

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situ...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situ...

And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist...

In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. Th...

The world is a better place when you smile.

The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case al...

To keep your marriage brimming,With love in the loving cup,Whenever you're wrong, admit it;Whenever ...

There is a sacred calling on your life, and the question is: Will you spend your life flittering and...

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but...

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort o...

No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,My subject is of man, and human kind.

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continu...

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap w...

I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image ...

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works th...

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking o...

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically corre...

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better...

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "Wha...

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the e...

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book AwardsHard times are coming, when we’ll be w...

The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a though...

I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Ni...

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get ri...

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) ...

The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.

My object is merely to give the reader a general introduction into an abode where, if so disposed, h...

Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you rerea...

Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.

Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their...

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harde...

Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand m...

Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The trut...

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost...

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your ...

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that ...

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where ...

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts....

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can g...

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen ...

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers...

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes...