Top 64 Quotes About Great Authors
#1. Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#2. Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.
John Farrar
#5. Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
Andre Gide
#6. Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.
Andre Maurois
#9. I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.
Mark Twain
#10. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
Hannah Arendt
#11. The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.
Mortimer J. Adler
#12. Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.
Michel De Montaigne
#13. Well, great authors are great people - but I believe that they are best seen at a distance.
Mary Russell Mitford
#14. Everyone writes the book he or she loves to read. Great authors write the books others love to read.
Chuck Miceli
#15. Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#16. A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.
Jonathan Galassi
#18. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#19. One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#20. No matter how great the love, the pain, the sadness, the power of a heart, no one can recreate the sea. Nowhere else.
Ondjaki
#21. Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.
Louise Imogen Guiney
#22. I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognised by the world.
Mo Yan
#23. The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.
Edward O. Wilson
#24. Authors ... keep writing those great books for children and teens. It's a proven fact that those children & teens who read are less depressed than those who don't.
Timothy Pina
#25. In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?
Gao Xingjian
#26. I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#27. The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.
Paul Di Filippo
#28. Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
Ellen J. Barrier
#29. Successful salesmen, authors, executives and workmen of every sort need patience. The great liability of youth is not inexperience but impatience.
William Feather
#30. I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.
Benjamin Franklin
#31. I tell everyone who asks me about writing ... almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!
Brooklyn Hudson
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Discovered Pages
#33. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Washington Irving
#34. Remember: Bad timing equals great plot twists.
A.L. Mabry
#35. Walking along the avenues, we had one of the so-called intellectual conversations, which consist a great deal in quoting names of books and authors.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#36. As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.
Frank Delaney
#37. There are a few of the authors that I think have made a great big impact on my life. The way I used to do things when I was younger was more about being outrageous, and there was a lot of ego involved in that.
Sandra Cisneros
#38. Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.
Ellen Douglas
#39. Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.
David A. Santos
#40. Walter Kaylin was great! He was outrageous, he just carried it off. He'd have this one guy killing a thousand other guys. Then they beat him into the ground, you think he's dead, but he rises up again and kills another thousand guys.
Mario Puzo
#41. The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.
Plutarch
#42. A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
Lev Grossman
#43. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#44. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Milan Kundera
#45. Our superhero foreign policy draws rivers of taxpayer dollars toward the center, empowering Washington at the expense of local governments. It also empowers the president at the expense of Congress in ways that upset the balance that the authors of the Constitution took great pains to design.
Ian Bremmer
#46. 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.
Conrad Williams
#47. There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.
Michel De Montaigne
#48. I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
Manuel Puig
#49. Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
#50. None save great men have been the authors of great heresies.
Saint Augustine
#51. I'm often asked which author I am most inspired by, but I'm inspired by all authors. It takes a great deal of courage to pour your onto paper and watch silently as the world judges it loudly.
Charity Parkerson
#52. Your best day can always become a great day. Your attitude solely depends on this.
Steven Cuoco
#53. Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#54. The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves.
Joseph Addison
#55. It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.
Milan Kundera
#56. Publishing companies and a great many authors have missed the opportunity to capitalize on the very real relationships they create with their readers.
Vantile Whitfield
#57. Proverbs 16:3 'Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and He will establish your plans.' A great reminder when planning out the school year.
Tamara L. Chilver
#58. If you are working with authors, you are accepting a great responsibility and must tread very carefully. The author's work is a part of herself, a creative endeavor she has poured her heart and soul into. Protecting and nurturing that work and the author is part of the job of a publisher.
Terena Scott
#59. Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.
Nathan Myhrvold
#60. One of the best things about my job is that I get to meet a lot of great children's and YA authors at events all over the country. So I figured it might be fun to interview some of them and turn the interviews into short online comics.
Steve Sheinkin
#61. When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.
Kevin Henkes
#62. The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: And behold, what he had done was good.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#63. It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.
Eugene Ionesco
#64. Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Milan Kundera
