Quotes About Authors

Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The author is grateful for permission to use the following copyrighted material: American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau

10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you're writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.

You know I just dispatched copies to Aldous Huxley & Ezra Pound—finally heard from them. And to Blaise Cendrars.‡ Also wrote a good letter to Emma Goldman.

But listen, I must finish Lawrence, Joyce & Proust. It's driving me nuts. I feel like a slacker. I'll spit them out alive, if necessary. I'm screwed up to a frenzy. Vino, vino . . . I wish I had the taste for it. Vino isn't strong enough. It's blood I want. Henry

When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.

If you're like most of our readers, you're probably wondering where we get all the ideas for our books from. Well, sometimes we think them up. Other times they are based on stuff that actually happens. Like this book, for instance. It all started one morning when I got up and went down to get some breakfast.

The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

It is observed that "a corrupt society has many laws;" I know not whether it is not equally true, that "an ignorant age has many books." When the treasures of ancient knowledge lie unexamined, and original authors are neglected and forgotten, compilers and plagiaries are encouraged, who give us again what we had before, and grow great by setting before us what our own sloth had hidden from our view.

Mary Henry ought to write romance novels. She has a way of embellishing that most authors would envy.

But I read so seldom, that I prefer books suited exactly to my taste. And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life, - and the friends who are about me, whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence,- which, without being absolutely paradise, is, on the whole, a source of indescribable happiness.

When I became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman authors, I thought it incumbent upon me to do something towards the honor of the place of my nativity, and to vindicate the rhetoric of this ancient forum of our Metropolis from the aspersions of the illiterate by composing A Treatise of the Alercation of the Ancients; wherein I have demonstrated that the purity, sincerity, and simplicity of their diction is nowhere so well preserved as amongst my neighbourhood.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Although these early Christian authors subordinated science and the study of nature to the needs of religion, they often indicated an interest in nature, as did Basil, that transcended the mere ancillary status that the study of nature was customarily accorded.

The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

I should add that concepts very much like sensitivity are being studied by other researchers. If you are interested in this work, you can look up terms such as biological sensitivity to context (authors will be Thomas Boyce, Bruce Ellis, and others) and orienting sensitivity (the main authors will be David Evans and Mary Rothbart).

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.