Authors Quotes

I can have but little doubt that my writing has been, in the main, too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be […]

All women, as authors, are feeble and tiresome. I wish they were forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster shell.

One hates an author that’s all author.

When I read something saying I’ve not done anything as good as “Catch 22” I’m tempted to reply, “Who has?”

In some books I have done more careful planning than in others, but always the end was seen from the beginning, and in each case it was the end that I set out to reach. I mean, literally, the end of the story: not necessarily the scene, but the feeling of the end, the mood […]

Read for ideas, not authors.

If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Wouldn’t it be awful if I came to Australia and looked you up, and everything you may have imagined about me turned out to be completely disappointing. I always say that if you like a man’s books, take care never to meet him.

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience.