Authors Quotes

“Authors, reviews are not for you. They are not for you. Authors, reviews are not for you.”
― Stacia Kane

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.”
― Libba Bray

“I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.”
― Julie Ann Dawson

“On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review--as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.”
― Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing

“There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.”
― Jo Linsdell

“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.

Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.”
― Mary O'Hara, Een zoele zomer in Wyoming

“Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one.

“Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper.

The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes.

“You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man.

“Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.”

“I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.”

“So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?”

“Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?”

Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock.

“He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor.

“Who is he?”

“A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.”
― Jeff Phillips, Turban Tan

“‎"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing”
― Mariam Kobras, The Distant Shore

“Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.”
― David A. Santos

“An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.”
― Sterling Lord, Lord of Publishing: A Memoir

“If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”
― Mary Karr

“How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, and artists that we believe you will love. And if we can identify some of the next generation of literary stars, and cultivate an appreciation for transformative poetry and fiction, then frankly we will sleep better at night.”
― Carmen Johnson

“Big writers become a kind of shared climate.”
― Adam Gopnik

“My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.”
― Josephine Hart, The truth about love

“When an artist–author, songwriter, moviemaker, whatever–created something, put it out there for the world to critique, to love it or hate it, it was impossible to control how people would react. There were as many ways to respond to a creative work as there were people who read it or watched it or listened to it.”
― Linwood Barclay, Whistle

“So let it be written, so let it be done.”
― Ramses II

“All her English professors say the best authors write what they know, but all Melanie knows is what has already been written. Petra is always on her case about going out into the world, experiencing things, but Melanie prefers to spend her time in her own reading chair at home. There she can sit with the quiet and not worry about filling a silence, coming up with something to add to a conversation. Petra always says Melanie is too worried about what people think, that Melanie truly believes no one will think what she has to say is worth listening to. Maybe Petra is right.”
― Mallory Arnold, How to Survive a Horror Story

“A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Daddy liked his books in alphabetical order, but before big events Anne Mom paid Vera ten dollars to reorganize the books in such a way that authors "of color" and women were "front and center" at eye level.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“A book can be finished, but the conversation it starts never ends. Reaching readers has become part of how I live.”
― Yoon Jeong Kim, The South Korean Diplomat's Wife: Stories of Silk Dresses, Scandals, and Secrets

“You see when you are selling under ten books and stories a year and you have zero likes on most of your quotes, that is the special time where you have a very close relationship with your art. I mean you still have total trust in your art and your art still has total trust in you. And so does the universe, or God. That is the reward. The relationship or connection with your art is untainted, pure, beautiful. I mean who is the most famous painter in the world? You see, distractions like fame destroy all that. It is just a shame that he did not live long enough to celebrate his success as a creator, though I am sure he did in his own way. This is related to your ego or label that you later accept when you are known by the masses, because when you are unknown, unread, unseen, un-smelled, unfelt, unheard, you are not yet labelled. Bukowski talked about that, how young authors were destroyed when they became famous early, their art being corrupted by their ego, and how others turned to political commentary. Bukowski was grateful that he never made it when he was young. So, he could carry on creating undisturbed, as it were, by society. Of course they came for him eventually, but as he famously said, they came for me too late. The remarkable thing about Van Gogh and Bukowski was how they both kept creating great art until their deaths. The fact that you are reading this quote and I am still unknown, and more importantly unlabelled is a blessing to you and me.”
― Jack Freestone

“I've been thinking a lot about what we lost when we lost Kurt Vonnegut, and the main thing that keeps coming to mind is that we lost a moral voice. We lost a very reasonable and credible--though not to say staid or toothless--voice who helped us know how to live.”
― Dave Eggers

“African-American writers with an independent vision are often consigned to obscurity. The white critics can only tolerate one black writer at a time, usually someone who subscribes to their values, and the black critics demand that they respect the official cultural trend of the moment.”
― Ishmael Reed, Black No More

“April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April of 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost.

So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Just because it was published does not mean it is true.”
― Chris Mentillo

“It's strange how characters can become bigger than their authors, but popular fiction is absolutely crowded with them.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Marble Hall Murders