Quotes About Authors

It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Writers are as jealous as pigeons.

For when we read, don't we summon the past into the present? Hold out our hand and invite an author to sit with us for a time?

He who would speak of unknown authors, buried beneath the rubble of centuries, inevitably lays himself open, at least to begin with, to the suspicion of being a crotchety sort with very queer tastes.

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

I've done a lot of interviews of the last few years, and I've actually started a list of questions that it would be fun to ask an author, but no respectable interviewer would ever ask. Since I'm not respectable, I'm going to start doing interviews with some authors I know, just for fun.

In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.

The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.

One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

I particularly like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Both writers have wit and imagination and the breadth of stories they tell coupled with extraordinary artwork make for fascinating reading.

Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

As George Russell defined a literary movement: "Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

The Shiah student of law, in attempting to reconstruct the subtext of premises and methods of reasoning that underlie these earlier books, is really attempting to reconstruct the mental process of their authors and ultimately, to read the minds of their inspirer, the true Legislator, God.

there were books and authors to be discovered. A lifetime of reading lay ahead. Old books, new books, classics, thrillers, stories short and tall, travelogues, histories, biographies, comedies, comic strips, poems, memories, fantasies, fables…The adventure would end only when the lights went out for ever.

I have signed books in the names of Enid Blyton, R.K. Narayan, Ian Botham, Daniel Defoe, Harry Potter and the Swiss Family Robinson. No one seems to mind.

In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.