AUTHORS

Related Subjects: Books, Fiction, Language, Literature, Plagiarism, Poets and Poetry, Writing

1. Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.—ADDISON, The Spectator
   

2. Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.—ADDISON, The Spectator
   

3. One hates an author that's all author.—BYRON, Beppo
   

4. O thou who art able to write a book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner. Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor.—CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus
   

5. There are men that will make you books, and turn 'em loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.CERVANTES, Don Quixote
   

6. A dull author, just delivered, and a plain woman about to be so, are two very important animals.—C. C. COLTON
   

7. Drop the bard and stop the punster,
   Let the quill stay on the goose;
   Take a business trip through
   Munster, Shoot a landlord—be of use!—One Irish Poet to Another, Padraic Colum: A Half Day's Ride
   

8. And choose an author as you choose a friend.—WENTWORTH DILLON, Essay on Translated Verse
   

9. A writer does not have to drool in order to convince us of his humanity; it is in fact the droolers whose humanitarianism is most suspect.—JOHN GASSNER, Masters of the Drama
   

10. I consider an author's literary reputation to be alive only while his name will insure a good price for his copy from the bookseller's.—GOLDSMITH, Boswell: Life of Dr. Johnson
    

11. Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.—GORKY
    

12. A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or .even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Death in the Afternoon
    

13. The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan
    

14. There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.—WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch-Book
    

15. It was, I think, Huxley who said that six monkeys set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum . . . if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance.—SIR JAMES JEANS, The Mysterious Universe
    

16. Grub Street: The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Dictionary
    

17. It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion.—CHARLES LAMB, Eliana
    

18. I met Sir Bulwer-Lytton, or Lytton Bulwer. He is anxious about some scheme for some association of literary men. I detest all such associations. I hate the notion of gregarious authors. The less we have to do with each other, the better.—MACAULAY
    

19. Let him be kept from paper, pen and ink
    So may he cease to write, and learn to think.—MATTHEW PRIOR
    

20. Like author, like book.—Proverb
    

21. He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.—SYDNEY SMITH, Lady Holland's Memoir
    

22. Authors are born very untidily. They do not live, as they should do, from century to century, or from reign to reign, but rise as and when they will, and do their work unwinkingly regardless of the historian.—FRANK SWINNERTON, Georgian Literary Scene
    

23. The author who succeeds in his work is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.—TOLSTOY
    

24. The writer must be a psychologist, but a secret one; he must sense and know the roots of phenomena, but offer only the phenomena themselves, as they blossom or wither.—TURGENIEV
    

25. Authors, in general, may be compared to sausage makers who prepare their stuff for others while sedu­lously not eating any themselves.—ZOLA