Quotes About Authors

There were others, such as Jack London,who offered their readers such a respite from the miserable horror of existence that their books were like gifts from the gods. (Character of Tristan Sadler in the Absolutist)

I used to do jacket design, and I'm very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

I have an excellent memory - for books and authors, that is. I remember all the books I've read.

I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who allocate $5,000 or $1,000.

Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White." "Middlemarch

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Y de mis autores más queridos, a los que vengo leyendo y releyendo desde hace tantos años? ¿Qué podría decir yo de Cervantes, de Kafka, de Shakespeare, de Dickens, de Faulkner, de Conrad, de Chéjov, de Borges, de Quevedo...? Apenas nada. Ni siquiera me he parado a pensar en ello.

Nor must you find fault with me if I often give you what I have borrowed from my various reading, in the very words of the authors themselves.

I could give you a number of examples to show how widespread has been this practice of mutual pilfering among the authors of our old literature.... by transferring something of theirs to his own immortal work he [Virgil] has ensured that the memory of these old writers—whom, as the tastes of today show, we are already beginning to deride as well as to neglect—should not wholly perish.

Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, one of my favorites, and LaRose by Louise Erdrich.

I have wanted to write from a young age, but working with so many gifted authors and editors over the years has taught me so much. I doubt I would be where I am today without that amazing experience.

I read everything, both serious and funny. Dickens, Thackeray, Rider Haggard, PG Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe, and the endless wailing of Virginia Woolf, thin terrible books where nothing happened.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

Although, honestly, watching authors fistfight is like watching geese play Jeopardy. There's a lot of honking and squawking but no one ever gets to what they're supposed to be doing.

Sarah Monette, Chris Roberson, Brandon Sanderson, K. J. Bishop and Steph Swainston

But my writing won't ever reflect the diversity that literature in general should be capable of. You need writers whose lives are not like mine for that.

Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Those of us we have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one can 'read between the lines,' 'unmask' the characters. After all, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen and D'Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind's eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once 'put in' the people he meets