Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.
Sarah Bernhardt

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.
Alfred de Vigny

One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
Anish Kapoor

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
William Goldman

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.
Julien Green

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
Alison Bechdel

President Roosevelt, the author of Social Security, was the first to suggest that, in order to provide for the country's retirement needs, Social Security would need to be supplemented by personal savings accounts.
John Doolittle

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.
John Grisham

Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.
Donald Norman

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
Dean Koontz

Right now, my career is in three directions: as a performer, as an arranger, as an author - and I don't give any one of them true precedent, or true top marks, as opposed to the other two.
Mel Torme

Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.
Jane Birkin

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
Harold Bloom

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
John M. Ford

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.
Frederik Pohl

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.
Edward Gibbon

The author knows just what he wants to illustrate and how he would like it to be done.
Louis Leakey

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
Chuck Jones

The author of McCarthyism was given the distinction of addressing the Republican National Convention. This strikes terror in the hearts of honest men.
Emanuel Celler