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

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.
Sarah Zettel

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov

I think of myself as a very lazy author.
Neil Gaiman

I think people enjoy a series. When you like a story, many readers want more of the same, which is dandy, if the author and the characters have more to say.
Sarah Zettel

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
Barbara Kruger

I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I'd pick out an author and I would read all their books.
Tom T. Hall

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.
Walter Jon Williams

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.
Manuel Puig

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
Mickey Spillane

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
Guy Debord

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
Sarah Fielding

If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
Joyce Brothers

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes.
Jacques-Louis David

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

If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research.
John Burke

In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.
Leslie Banks

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

In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.
Margaret Weis