58 Quotes Tagged: Authors

"There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

Authors are partial to their wit

There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one's still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like [James] Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer — any writer, beginning or otherwise — is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or — kindest of all — goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
(on Ernest Hemingway

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review — as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Some men write their lives to save themselves from ennui, careless of the amount they inflict on their readers.