Author Quotes

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.

I think of myself as a very lazy author.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

There is one Quality, which has somewhat so heavenly in it; that by so much the more we are possess'd of it, by so much the more we draw nearer to the Great Author of Nature.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

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.

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.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.

Truth is Mormonism. God is the author of it.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

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.

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?

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!

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.