Top 475 Author Quotes

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author’s intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure.

My neighbors don’t care that I’m an author. It’s inherently ego-inhibiting.

If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I’ve found that the most engaging and satisfying author events I’ve done are with other people, where the conversation is spontaneous. I think that is by far the better way to introduce and promote a book.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

This first print run of the first edition of my first novel, ‘When The Lion Feeds.’ back in 1964, is so rare it can fetch several thousand pounds at auction. I always wanted to be an author, and I decided to write about what I knew.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.

I can’t inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I’d like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.

Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author’s product. The real universe ain’t that way, and neither are my fictive ones.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to ‘shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they’re the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.’ That sounded like bad advice to me.

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself – forgiving himself – in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

I didn’t want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn’t love literature, but I couldn’t distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.

I want to be really clear about something: I think we kind of fetishize the creative life. We have the vision of what it means to be an author, where you sit in your garret or looking out at your view and you give everything to your art and you commit fully to it. But the reality is that most of us have bills to pay.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author’s own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of ‘Dracula’ is appetite.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I’m certainly not the first author to tiptoe into the conspiratorial, religious-tinged territory, but – and I hate to break this to the faithful – neither is Dan Brown.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

When I decided I wanted to become an author, I never thought something I wrote would be used as a way to start conversations that are otherwise difficult to begin.

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they’re not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews – so I’m in favour of starving him.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author’s vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.

I’ve discovered as an author that the process of writing a novel becomes harder over time, not easier. I used to think the reverse must be true, that it would be like any task, and the more I practiced, the more adept I’d become.

Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the foundation upon which sincere and meaningful repentance must be built. If we truly seek to put away sin, we must first look to Him who is the Author of our salvation.

First, hugely popular and talented romance/dark fantasy author Meljean Brook gives a really deep, wonderful story. She’s clearly spent so much time thinking about the world of Sonja and her story in particular, it could easily have been a novel of its own.

And now, I’m a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I’ll wake up from.

I have dreamt of being an author since the age of 14, and writing about my experiences has always been a part of digesting an experience and sharing it with others.

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.

Am I really an author if I just put pictures in a book?

In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author… I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.

There’s something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes.

When you’re in a play, 50 percent is the genius of the actor, 50 percent is the genius of the author. When a mime is not perfect, you see nothing.

I don’t think anyone sits down and thinks, ‘I know, I’ll be a chick-lit writer.’ You write the book that you want to write and then other people say, ‘Oh, that’s chick-lit.’ You say, ‘Okay.’ But it’s not like you look around and go to a careers fair and there will be someone at the chick-lit author stand.

As a writer, it’s important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.

It’s a lot harder for an author that’s unpublished to say, ‘Hey, here’s a new book.’ There’s nothing of theirs to read, so you don’t know what it’s going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.

I may not remember the name of a book’s author, but let it be clear, what I will not forget is the violence, the poverty and the desperation that Mexico is living through.

Both villains and heroes are a bit boring, really, unless they’re flawed and broken somehow. If they’re not flawed and broken, then clearly they need to be broken and made flawed. That’s what an author does if he or she has any dignity.

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.