Quotes About Authors

Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led,They damn those authors whom they never read.

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.

If any preposterous bill were brought forward, for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own property I should like to say, that I for one would never consent to opposing an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among the people...

Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles.... Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission is to the sense and application of the original. Every transplantation has altered the fruit of the tree; every new channel, the quality of the stream in its remove from the spring-head.

I mention this only to shew that the citations of the most judicious authors frequently deceive us, and consequently that prudence obliges us to examine quotations, by whomsoever alleged.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Closure's a sham invented by talk-show hosts and self-help authors.

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started.

The spiritual-but-nonreligious movement is largely driven by charismatic authors and speakers who attract like-minded people to their workshops and intensives.

reread James Street's Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville, Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote.

Our five-hundred-plus library-loving comedians march down the halls behind me.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Unfortunately for me, most of the books I'd want to reprint were written for savvy publishers like Harlequin and Berkley who have held on to electronic rights. But I do have another option: Publish new e-books myself.

I've had such an amazing opportunity to work on so many different types of projects that continued on to Broadway. Unfortunately I didn't always continue on with them. Still, you know, I always had such a great pride in kind of helping the authors and directors create the show.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.

I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.

Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn't be publishing anyone at all after a while.

It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?