Author Quotes

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, said an eminent scholar, have God for their Author, the Salvation of mankind for their end, and Truth without any mixture of error for their matter.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

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.

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.

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.