Author Quotes - page 3

Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author. View quote
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists. View quote
Stephen Sondheim
Rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing. View quote
Cat Stevens
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. View quote
Edward Gibbon
One of the things I like about publishing is that you don't promote the editor - you promote the book and the author. View quote
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society. View quote
Edmund Burke
In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own. View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year. View quote
W. H. Auden
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text. View quote
Roland Barthes
Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate. (Washington Irving)
Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
... coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. View quote
David Mermin
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end. View quote
Cesare Pavese
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good. View quote
Seneca
When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition. View quote
Joseph Addison
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being. (A. A. Milne)
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. View quote
P. G. Wodehouse
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent. View quote
Pierre Bayle
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. View quote
Dean Koontz
Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written. View quote
Noël Coward