Top 100 Quotes About Authorship
#1. Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice.
[Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]
Horace
#2. He who proposes to be an author should first be a student.
John Dryden
#3. Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.
Christopher Morley
#4. I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.
Julian Darius
#6. For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.
Michael A. Arnzen
#7. The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. So there's a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it.
Mark Rylance
#9. I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.
Mary Shelley
#10. Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
P. J. O'Rourke
#11. We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#12. Only mothers will ever know the true struggle and sacrifice it takes to create life. Authors come in at a close second.
R.P. Falconer
#13. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
Dave Eggers
#14. I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.
Adam Rapp
#15. The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn't encourage more authorship - it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films.
Marvin Ammori
#16. There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#17. That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he has published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#18. People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship.
Jonathan Ive
#19. If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.
Robert Longo
#21. To lead and live the life of your dream, you must arise and be in-charge of the authorship of your own destiny.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#22. Why I love these words
They are mine
You cannot change that
You cannot rearrange that
Try as you might
You cannot take away
All that they mean to me
Maddy Kobar
#23. Putting my book down should be the hardest thing my reader has to do that day. Authorship is a merciless business!
Rachel Aaron
#24. 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.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#25. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.
Breece D'J Pancake
#26. Let it (what you have written) be kept back until the ninth year.
[Lat., Nonumque prematur in annum.]
Horace
#27. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.
Ngaio Marsh
#28. A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#29. In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.
Peter C Bunnell
#31. The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.
Joseph Addison
#33. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#34. We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.
Ngaio Marsh
#35. Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note?? To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.
Anthony Trollope
#36. That's the thing about writers -on one hand evrything is sacred to them, but, on the other, nothing really is.
Lang Leav
#37. She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date.
E. M. Forster
#38. All authors to their own defects are blind.
John Dryden
#39. The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer ... is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.
Vera Brittain
#40. My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
U.G. Krishnamurti
#41. If skeptics were willing to give the Gospels the same 'benefit of the doubt' they are willing to give other ancient documents, the Gospels would easily pass the test of authorship.
J. Warner Wallace
#42. Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
Christopher Hitchens
#43. Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.
William Cowper
#44. Brevity in writing is
what charity is to all other virtues - righteousness is nothing
without the one,
nor authorship without the other.
Sydney Smith
#45. There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness; it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.
Charles Caleb Colton
#46. Whatever hath been written shall remain,
Nor be erased nor written o'er again;
The unwritten only still belongs to thee:
Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#47. A third ... candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.
Bill Bryson
#48. If have got my spindle and my distaff ready
my pen and mind
never doubting for an instant that God will send me flax.
J.G. Holland
#49. Writing to please all tastes is like cooking without seasoning...
Nanette L. Avery
#50. Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.
Harriet Martineau
#51. And hold up to the sun my little taper.
Lord Byron
#52. Some people have a lot of time, but no money--
It's because they don't work hard enough.
Some people have a lot of money, but no time--
It's because they don't work smart enough.
The most successful people have both.
Bob Sharpe
#53. I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.
Julian Barnes
#54. In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
John Green
#55. Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.
Mark Twain
#56. I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry
J.R. Moehringer
#57. I grow more and more intrigued by this as I write: how words, even the most carefully chosen, can mean such different things from one person to another, so that others might think about what I write in ways I did not intend at all.
Dawn Hammill
#58. The essential ingredient of authorship is authority. You hunt it out in a library, you chase it down the street, or you knit it from the fiber of your own will. From somewhere, you get it. You begin
Barbara Kingsolver
#59. You shouldn't write about your personal life', says the one feeling threatened by the truth to the writer.
Robin Sacredfire
#60. Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.
Ellen Glasgow
#61. [Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.
Samuel Beckett
#62. Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#63. The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#64. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?
W.G. Sebald
#65. I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.
Asa Gray
#66. I want to be the most unsold, and the most unsought-after author, after I stop selling my fake name anagrams on the internet.
Will Advise
#67. Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.
Stefanos Livos
#68. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
George Wald
#69. Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it ... a speelycaptor ... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.
Neal Stephenson
#70. Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
Sam Harris
#71. When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way.
Misha Collins
#72. Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
Jonathan Swift
#73. And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question ... at completely different levels.
Mark Rylance
#74. The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.
James K. Morrow
#75. Comment on the authorship of the Pentateuch (Genesis - Deuteronomy)" -" ... it is not the author who is important. What matters is the existence of a message that is relevant to the community.
Samuel Ngewa
#77. I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
Tanith Lee
#78. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.
Charles Lamb
#80. I have observed that vulgar readers almost always lose their veneration for the writings of the genius with whom they have had personal intercourse.
Egerton Brydges
#81. After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it's no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon.
Peter S. Beagle
#82. From the moment one sets up for an author, one must be treated as ceremoniously, that is as unfaithfully, as a king's favorite or a king.
Alexander Pope
#83. The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
George Sand
#84. I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.
David Knopfler
#85. Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.
Charles Dickens
#86. We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#87. The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success is dedicated to you, the writer. Authorship requires great courage, creativity, sacrifice and perseverance. You inspire me.
Mark Coker
#88. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations.
Mary Shelley
#89. This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo - an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published - a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.
William Boyd
#90. There's as much great authorship in the filmmaker community as in the literary community, and I'd love to welcome more filmmakers into the fold.
Nina Jacobson
#91. You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny. The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand. ~
Irene C. Kassorla
#92. If there's a will, there's a way!
I feel larger than LIFE
and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders ... as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night..
Donna Scrima-Black
#93. Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
Lawrence Venuti
#94. True authors don't write for fame or to make a name or money, they write to make impact
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#95. Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.
Benjamin Disraeli
#96. If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
Jaron Lanier
#97. From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic
Arthur Conan Doyle
#99. Every author begins as a reader. So, read yourself into authorship.
Blaque Diamond
#100. There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.
Elena Ferrante
