Best 545 quotes in «authors quotes» category

The difference between a writer and an author: Writers call each other writers. Readers call writers authors.

The difference between the oldest and the most stupid job you do is that one is selling herself and the other is selling you.

The ending to your book is different from the ending to your plot.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.

The greatest skill that an author could possess, she thought, was the ability to make a reader see a book as his or her child, someone only the reader in question could truly appreciate, love, and protect.

The greatest tragedy to ever happen to a nation is not the incidences of war or terrorism. It's when more bookshops close down and more drinking bars are opened to replace them!

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one. “Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper. The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes. “You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. “Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.” “I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.” “So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?” “Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?” Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock. “He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor. “Who is he?” “A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.

The lot of the bride to be wed before bed desired until rotten. The lot of the author to be read before bed admired then forgotten.

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

The only man she ever loved. And hated.

Then she wants to say that, oh, Christ, of course she knows, the condescension Europeans shower on Americans is not always warranted; she's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one-woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013]

The only thing in life that's really interesting is the contest. We are all contestants--whether we admit it or not. If I read 20 pages of a book and they're no good, I put it down. Maybe it's good after 100 pages, but I can't wait. The author lost.

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.

The problem with taxation is that authors can't write off whiskey as a business expense.

There are a million ways to create. It’s not always typing words, painting pictures, or acting in a play. And you don’t get to decide which is correct.

The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.

The realization that a decline in the moral state impedes the flowering of literature is a feeling unique to the Jewish people. Only we realize in truth that in order to improve the quality of literature, there is a necessary prerequisite, that the writers first cleanse their souls. We feel in ourselves the great need for penitence so that we might rise to the sublime heights of the noble literature that is uniquely ours, that stems from the wisdom of Israel, whose source is holiness and purity, faith and spiritual heroism.- Kook, Lights of Penitence, p. 118.

There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time. Bacon is also an acceptable restorative.

There is a big difference between an imperfect book that is read and a perfect book that is never written

There is only two kind of #books .First one is by some #famous person and Second one makes a person #famous .

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York." (on Tom Wolfe)

There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.

There's a darkness to everyone, you just have to let it out to see the world in new eyes.

There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.

These days. Most of us have the attention span of a meth-addicted squirrel.

There's writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

The secret to success is no secret. Be honest in your words, be trustworthy and share value. Most people won't tell the difference, but those that do are your readers.

The sacred-souls of authors are displayed in the beauty of their books.

The same Andrew Smith is in all these books, but for me, I feel like you can see the point in his writing where he decided he no longer had anything to lose. That, to me, is when he reached the top of his game.” ~ Christa Desir

The self-addressed stamped envelope. The representation of everything that was wrong with the old publishing industry.

The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language.

The truth is, you could write a masterpiece, but if you're hiding it under a rock, no one will ever know.

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

The worst reviews, by my mind, are those from individuals who enjoy entertaining themselves by writing something bad about books they actually never read, which is as clear as day from what they’re saying. It’s even more puzzling for an author to check some of these “honest” reviewers’ pages and see that they created their profile with one goal in mind; to post you a bad review, as there’s nothing else they wanted to rate.

The written word is greatest sacred documentation.

Things belong to the people that use them, not to the people who create them.

They're Coming.

they say that girls are the ones who want fairy tail endings, but then again, who are the authors of fairy tales? mostly men...

This is the best time to be an author.