44 Quotes Tagged: author

We are living in the Selfie Society of Me.

The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.

"There is a sacred calling on your life, and the question is: Will you spend your life flittering and fluttering about or take the time and really heed that call and create your own path to your highest good?...You cannot let other people define your life for you. You are the author of your own life...Real power is when you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, the best it can be done. Authentic power. There's a surge, there's a kind of energy field that says, "I'm in my groove, I'm in my groove." And nobody has to tell you, "You go, girl," because you know you're already gone."

"I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head."

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

In a job you trade your freedom and time for money.

"To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up."

~Happy birthday Ogden Nash! (born 8.19.1902)

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.

I sought out men who’d had unusual experiences or more likely had usual ones that they understood with unusual clarity, and from this melange of information and observation I acquired a good perception of what the great Pacific adventure meant in human terms. Clearly, almost clinically, I concluded that if you ordered all the young men of a generation to climb Mount Everest, you would expect the climb to have a major significance in their lives. And while they were climbing the damned mountain they would bitch like hell and condemn the assignment, but years later, as they looked back, they’d see it as the supreme adventure it was and they’d want to read about it to reexperience it.
These thoughts led to a clear-cut conviction: Years from now the men who complain most loudly out here will want to explain to others what it was like. I’m sure of it, so I’m going to write down as simply and honestly as I can what it was really like. And I reassured myself: No one knows the Pacific better than I do; no one can tell the story more accurately. This was not a boast; it was true and relevant to the task I planned to set myself.” — Chapter VIII, “Writing”, page 265

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

I don't have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?