Literary Author Quotes

#1. I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

John Grisham

#2. SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

Ambrose Bierce

#3. It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career. -

Ernest Hemingway,

#4. Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.

John Shelby Spong

#5. Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it
convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author's vision exceeds his grasp, and bring the cleavage between intention and performance into clear perspective.

John E. Stoll

#6. I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.

Adam Christopher

#7. I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer isn't aware of.

Umberto Eco

#8. Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Patricia Fuller

#9. I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.

Jay McInerney

#10. Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Aberjhani

#11. Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Robertson Davies

#12. The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

Vladimir Nabokov

#13. The author is impacted by a hidden insistence that takes the shape of different combinations each time a
different text is produced but the underlying problem remains the same for him.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#14. I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

Dorothy Parker

#15. When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

Peter York

#16. Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

James Rollins

#17. The sorcery is not confined to the story; it's matched by the magic of Austin's literary craftsmanship.
--Leland Dirks, author of Angelo's Journey

R.L. Austin

#18. Write from Beyond what you know. From the authority of your senses. -author of Meditations in Green

Steven Wright

#19. Writing a book is like dating. It's exciting. It's dreamy. And after four years, I just want to end it.

Carole Radziwill

#20. Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink.

Mark Kurlansky

#21. Rather, it provided a literary framework within which the author could effectively express the Hebraic conviction that one God created the world by bringing order out of chaos. He was interested in thematic rather than chronological organization. The

Gregory A. Boyd

#22. My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.

Guy Davenport

#23. My reviews of the above books appear in my series, A Literary Cavalcade. Reviews are listed alphabetically by author across the six volumes.

Robert A. Parker

#24. ... the primary trait of young adult literature is that the author's emphasis is on plot and character and not on his own brilliance. And because few people talk about whether a young adult work is commercial or literary; the two are still in sync, and everyone's benefitting.

Eliot Schrefer

#25. In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

Ian Gregor

#26. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?

Stephen Fry

#27. (On literary festivals) When you go and see a band play live, you are watching it do on stage what it is meant to do. When you watch an author perform live, you are, most of the time, watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

Nicholas Lezard

#28. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Arthur Miller

#29. When I finally find that one willing agent, I'll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#30. A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Marcel Proust

#31. Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword.

Max Hawthorne

#32. A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical ...

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

#33. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

George Orwell

#34. There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

Larry Niven

#35. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

United Nations

#36. In the context of Lawrence's rejection of the Freudian notion of incest and the close identification between author and character, Sons and Lovers becomes an exercise in deliberate ambiguity.

John E. Stoll

#37. Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.

Brad Listi

#38. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

John Banville

#39. I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author.
Wine is bottled poetry

Robert Louis Stevenson

#40. Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

Terry Eagleton

#41. The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

Jean De La Bruyere

#42. 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.

Samuel Johnson

#43. [N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.

Sue Hubbell

#44. There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

Edward Abbey

#45. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. (Rule of Four, 54-55)

Ian Caldwell

#46. Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life.

P.G. Wodehouse