Authorship Quotes

You do not publish your own verses Laelius you criticise mine. Pray cease to criticise mine or else publish your own.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.

Elena Ferrante

The right to be attributed as an author of a work is not merely a copyright, it is every author’s basic human right

Kalyan C. Kankanala

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.

Rebecca Solnit

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.

Stefanos Livos

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress truth.

Wole Soyinka

Poetic justice, with her lifted scale,Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,And solid pudding against empty praise. Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day,Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play:How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry.

Alexander Pope

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.

Julian Darius

I want to be the most unsold, and the most unsought-after author, after I stop selling my fake name anagrams on the internet.

Will Advise

Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Breaking through writer's block is like thinking out of the box: Both require an ability to imagine a world outside your four walls or rearranging them to get a better view.

Susan J. McIntire

When writing feels like jumping a cliff, grab the nearest pen!

Susan J. McIntire

Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

Joanne Harris

When I write, my soul sings.

Melissa Marsh

All stories are the sin of their weaver.

Miyuki Miyabe

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

Breece D'J Pancake

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance.

Robin Sacredfire

Only mothers will ever know the true struggle and sacrifice it takes to create life. Authors come in at a close second.

R.P. Falconer

I grow more and more intrigued by this as I write: how words, even the most carefully chosen, can mean such different things from one person to another, so that others might think about what I write in ways I did not intend at all.

Dawn Hammill

Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book

Johnny Rich

He who writes to his beloved every day, is not a lover, but a writer.

Dr. Kyaciss Pfiell

I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like.

Margaret Cavendish

Turn your thoughts to novel writing—narrative, let it be about what it will, is read, because the mind quietly acquiesces, and it requires no trouble to think about it. On your part it will demand much less care in the composition. Never mind improbabilities—put together a sufficient number of facts—the more unlikely the better. If you are too idle to choose the trouble of inventing, collect eight or nine of the most popular works of that sort; take a piece of one, and a piece of another, and put them together, only a little altered, just to disguise them: never mind whether what the painters call keeping, can in this motley assemblage be attended to; nobody thinks about that: sprinkle the whole plentifully with horrors of some sort or other, to stimulate the languid attention, and you will have a certainty of a sale at least among the circulating libraries, which, after all, is the principal sale that can be expected; for who buy novels?—Who indeed buy books at all in these times?

Charlotte Turner Smith

To lead and live the life of your dream, you must arise and be in-charge of the authorship of your own destiny.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

Henry James

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it's no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon.

Peter S Beagle

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it tha

Cormac McCarthy

One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.

Samuel R. Delany

Novel-writing has in one respect an affinity to the drama—that time and distance are required to soften for use the harsher features that may be exhibited from real life; that it was almost impossible to bring forward events without touching on their causes; and that any tendency to political discussion, however liberal or applicable, was not to be tolerated in a sort of work which people took up with no other design than to be amused at the least possible expence of thought.

Charlotte Turner Smith

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

George R.R. Martin

I find it quite intriguing that the one observing me as different, immediately assumes that there's something wrong with me, but never, not even for one instant, questions the possibility of the opposite. It's truly amazing that the ones with more certainties, the most arrogant and the most selfish, are indeed the most stupid inside society. They are so dumb and ignorant that they can't see a writer in front of their nose. And the more the writer types, talks and thinks, the more they think that this separation, this difference, grants them some form of superiority. Indeed, the light pushes demons into hell. The brighter your light, the faster you differentiate others. The way of the light was never meant for the weak, which are a majority. And this majority will always ignore the light, as demons fearing and hating angels. And so, it's interesting that without artists God would not have a way to reach the world. And yet, without the ignorant, Satan wouldn't have a way to stop God.

Robin Sacredfire

You shouldn't write about your personal life', says the one feeling threatened by the truth to the writer.

Robin Sacredfire

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

John Green

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

Neal Stephenson

In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times.

Eraldo Banovac

I don't know what love is, so I'll redefine it.

Kierra C.T. Banks

All Authors come from the unified countrynent known as Australia. Authors live in the future where love is external.

Will Advise

A writer may not know the way at first; but if he endeavors to complete his task, he carves a path with his story, a knowledge shortcut.

Susan J. McIntire

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

Samuel Beckett

If there's a will, there's a way!I feel larger than LIFE--and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders....as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night..

Donna Scrima-Black

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

Ngaio Marsh

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

Voltaire

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Cormac McCarthy

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

Michel de Montaigne

We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.

Ngaio Marsh

Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.

Christopher Hitchens

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

Tanith Lee

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.

Dave Eggers

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Authorship Quotes

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