Authors Quotes

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet a...

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

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from ...

If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, ...

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some ...

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject wit...

In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to ment...

I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want ...

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and wr...

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than y...

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overr...

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and bel...

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (who...

The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because p...

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York." (...

Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, h...

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts dif...

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corn...

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hou...

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers c...

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumber...

Books are for nothing but to inspire

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the read...

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for th...

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all...

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shutt...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The...

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Moth...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The...

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Moth...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The...

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Moth...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The...

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Moth...

Author? Author? Did you write these legs?''Yes."'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at ...

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make ...

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The ...

[The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must...

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors ...

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long tim...

All raw, uncooked, protesting."(on Aldous Huxley)

I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that t...

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the...

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal...

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such ...

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

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a r...

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

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for...

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully u...

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own...

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. T...

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unabl...

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they w...

What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and ...

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic ...

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't t...

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do the...

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are...

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad ...

I don’t think writers compete, I think they’re all doing separate things in their own style.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are f...

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by peopl...

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and speci...

I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect,...

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an ...

An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be ...

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.

Fool! Nothing but black ink runs through my veins!

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single ...

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image y...