Quotes About Authors

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

As writers, we should remind ourselves, and each other, that Jane Austen and JK Rowling got rejected by publishers, too.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, had just been published. The other was a Pulitzer Prize–winner, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout,

Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.

Thus Jesus shares with many Jewish authors of the time the view that men are to take responsibility for their sexuality, not women, and not seek to cover and control them. Jesus belongs with those who do not see women as a danger or threat, though clearly not all his disciples shared this stance.

But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start.

Bible consists of sixty-six books written by some forty different authors over a period of about 1,500 years. The authors came from every imaginable background—"kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen and scholars. It was written on at least three different continents in three different languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—yet, there is a thread of continuity from Genesis to Revelation.

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

The Bible is actually a library of books-some long, some short- written over hundreds of years by many authors. Behind each one, however, was [the] Author: the Spirit of God.

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrowers, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.