Authors Quotes

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

When I was a ten-year-old book worm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a […]

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

Be sure to go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

Those of us we have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.

Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

I wonder whether Salman Rushdie would have written “The Satanic Verses” if he had been born as handsome as Imran Khan.