Author Quotes

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Abraham Lincoln

Time, Live, Through

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Best, Become, Writer

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Jim Rohn

Truth, Study, Reason

The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure.
John Locke

God, Men, Truth

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.
Plato

May, Said, Often

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Child, Solitude, Himself

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
Voltaire

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Against, Himself, Works

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Aldous Huxley

Good, Bad, Book

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
Thomas Paine

War, Death, Hell

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they're rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.
Bill Gates

Success, Musician, Anxious

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
Aldous Huxley

Same, Else, Somebody

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Good, Bad, Line

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Good, Truth, Bad

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Mind, May, Style

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
Blaise Pascal

Person, Find, Natural

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
Alexis de Tocqueville

May, Him, America

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.
Benjamin Disraeli

Mother, Bad, Children

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.
Wilson Mizner

Research, Plagiarism, Steal

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen King

Good, Busy, Story

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Time, Him, Same

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Samuel Butler

Life, Living, Works

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Write, Youth, Next

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
Henry Miller

Work, Good, Great

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
W. Somerset Maugham

Good, Truth, Tell

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
Ross Perot

Good, Great, Writing

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
A. A. Milne

Money, Business, State

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
Andre Maurois

Life, Great, Negative

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
Marquis de Sade

Nature, God, Wise

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Two, Familiar, Engaging

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Pliny the Elder

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