Quotes About Author

James - Are you paying attention or just trying to make me look like an idoit? Elizabeth - Oh, I'm definately paying attention. If you look like an idiot it has nothing to do with me.

A man with charm is an entertaining thing, and a man with looks is, ofcourse, a sight to behold, but a man with honor - ah, he is the one, dear reader, to which young ladies should flock.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That's all.

The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

I'd ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that's where they belong. Go on, take them: let

He died a modern death, in hospital,........after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive.

And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new clichés.

It is a moment when a shift in the nature of literary fame occurs. Previously, a famous writer was a writer who became famous by writing. Wilde pioneered the idea of becoming famous first, and then getting down to the writing. By the end of 1882 he was "still" only a minor poet and diligent lecturer. But he was also famous on two continents and therefore primed for a literary career.

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what.

Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.

I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.

perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty

The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... Mad has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.

The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God's detritus.

melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance)

When I felt myself escaping from the earth," he commented, "my reaction was not pleasure but happiness." It was "a moral feeling," he added. "I could hear myself living, so to speak.