Authors Quotes
Most popular authors quotes
Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love each other. All they really desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a receptive listener.
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
Choose an author as you choose a friend.
The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance—on the page.
The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living; they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.
The author is like the host at a party. It is his party, but he must not enjoy himself so much that he neglects his guests. His enjoyment is not so much his own as it is theirs.
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat.
An author is like a horse pulling a coal-cart down an icy hill; he ought to stop, but when he reflects that it would probably kill him to try, he goes right on, neighing and rolling his eyes.
All authors to their own defects are blind.
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.
No author ever spar'd a brother; Wits are game-cocks to one another.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.
It isn't easy for an author to remain a pleasant human being: both success and failure are usually of a crippling kind.
In my experience, after a few months, an author usually feels that his novel is taking control.
The simplest way to torture an author is to get his name wrong and forget what books he has written.
I never saw an author in my life, saving perhaps one, that did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat on having his fur smoothed the right way by a skillful hand.
A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.
An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.
A transition from an author's book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city.
It is advantageous to an author, that his book should be attacked as well as praised.
Authors are easy to get on with—if you're fond of children.
Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another.
I hate the actor-and-the-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
The great authors share their souls with us—"literally."
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in.
Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old.
The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
Authors may be divided into three classes—shooting stars, planets, and fixed stars.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Authors are actors, books are theatres.
Authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings and emperors, exert an influence on mankind.
The author's character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs.
There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.
Every author is surrounded by an aura of adulation which he nurses so assiduously that he cannot begin to judge his own worth or see when it starts to decline.
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him.
