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

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

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, said an eminent scholar, have God for their Author, the Salvation of mankind for their end, and Truth without any mixture of error for their matter.
Adam Clarke

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Augusten Burroughs

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
Edward Gibbon

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.
Thomas W. Higginson

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
Jerzy Kosinski

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

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
Norman Cousins

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.
Robert Benchley

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
William Trevor

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

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.
Pierre Bayle

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
Pierre Bayle

There is one Quality, which has somewhat so heavenly in it; that by so much the more we are possess'd of it, by so much the more we draw nearer to the Great Author of Nature.
Eliza Haywood

These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.
Giorgio Vasari

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
J. D. Hayworth

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.
David Guterson

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
Charles Caleb Colton

Truth is Mormonism. God is the author of it.
Joseph Smith, Jr.