Literary Fame Quotes

#1. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

J.M. Coetzee

#3. And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn't changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

Douglas Coupland

#4. Hast thou not learnd what thou art often told, A truth still sacred, and believed of old, That no success attends on spears and swords Unblest, and that the battle is the Lords?

William Cowper

#5. Don't know why you... say good-bye. I say... hello.

Isaac Marion

#6. I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.

Diane Setterfield

#7. Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.

Eric Rohmer

#8. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#9. Never forget what you were saved from.

Jim George

#10. It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

Ray Bradbury

#11. I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and they were one of the most important bands, for me.

Martin Gore

#12. Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.

Tyler Cowen

#13. The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does "fame" become, especially of the literary sort. This species of "fame" a waggish acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured.

Herman Melville

#14. Life has only one equation. The equation of giving.

Amit Ray

#15. In this age where people can become famous without doing anything, we are now encouraging a literary and publishing atmosphere where you must become famous before you can do anything.

Daniel R. Thorne

#16. An old maid, that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps ...

Louisa May Alcott

#17. Death is not grievous to me, for I shall lay aside my pains by death.
[Lat., Nec mihi mors gravis est posituro morte dolores.]

Ovid

#18. Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#19. Suddenly - I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very depths of the last days, to shine - and to hell with everything else! That is my motto - and the sun's!

Amor Towles

#20. Music is something that always lifts my spirits and makes me happy, and when I make music I always hope it will have the same effect on whoever listens to it.

Aaron Carter

#21. [A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

#22. I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Heidi Julavits

#23. When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#24. Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work.

Dejan Stojanovic

#25. Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,
a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.
But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me.

Robert Creeley