116 Memorable Quotes From Authors

In the world of literature, words hold the power to inspire, provoke thought, and evoke a spectrum of emotions. Authors, through their creative genius, craft sentences that resonate with readers across generations. Whether capturing the essence of the human condition, exploring philosophical truths, or simply offering comfort, memorable quotes from authors have a unique ability to linger in our minds. This collection of 116 quotes serves as a testament to the enduring impact of literary artistry. Each quote is a window into the mind of its creator, providing insights that are as relevant today as when they were first penned. Join us as we explore these pearls of wisdom, celebrating the voices that have profoundly shaped our understanding of the world.

1. “Determine the result you desire..law of averages does not know the objective untill the decision is made. Once a decision is made, the law of averages goes into operation.” - Earl Prevette

2. “What an author doesn't know could fill a book.” - Holly Black

3. “The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ” - Virginia Woolf

4. “The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.” - Alberto Manguel

5. “There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.” - Pamela Ribon

6. “It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ” - Charles Dickens

7. “When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

8. “We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.” - John Hodgman

9. “As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?” - Milan Kundera

10. “But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.” - Gloria Whelan

11. “Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation” - Angela Davis

12. “1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one — fame or delight.5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.6. Cunning and excess are your friends.7. TV and liquor are your enemies.8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.9. You’re done when the crows sing.” - Ron Dakron

13. “This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.” - Leon Uris

14. “You can't become a star just by watching one on TV. Dream big and go for your goals!” - Koltn Burbank

15. “To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.” - Dana Stabenow

16. “Life's adventures make great reading!” - Denise Robbins

17. “Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.De-accession euphemisms.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.” - William Safire

18. “AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest.” - Christopher Seufert

19. “But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.” - Jeffrey L. Staley

20. “You see, unlike most writers today, I do not use a computer. I write the old-fashioned way: on the walls of caves.” - Cuthbert Soup

21. “Where Norman Rockwell is the Artist for the man on the street, O'Henry is his author.” - Sonia Rumzi

22. “Remain humble in your journey as an author and your audience will embrace you. Remain grateful for every publicity opportunity that comes your way, and the media will embrace you.” - Linda F. Radke

23. “Write what you know best. If you can't survive a cross-examination from a lawyer on the subject, you won't survive an interview with a journalist or anchorperson." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications.” - Linda F. Radke

24. “Even the most beautifully written, perfectly edited and well-designed books will fail if people aren't made aware of them!" ––Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications, on the importance of public relations and marketing.” - Linda F. Radke

25. “Being a writer is a good, good thing.” - Shannon Hale

26. “The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.” - Washington Irving

27. “Most people keep their dreams to themselves, afraid to follow their hearts. Writers make their dreams a reality with each word, each line that flows from their pen.” - CK Webb

28. “I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it” - steve aylett

29. “He had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards” - steve aylett

30. “Предпочитам да общувам с хора, които не са прочели нито една книга, отколкото с някого, който мисли, че Гришам е писател.” - Радослав Парушев

31. “I write books, bitch!” - Junnita Jackson

32. “Yeah, I write Urban Fantasy, but its more like Die Hard or Indiana Jones with Fairies, Mummies and a Vampire who uses guns more than his teeth.” - Kevin James Breaux

33. “It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.” - Felix Okoye

34. “Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

35. “Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.” - John Bunyan

36. “Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.” - colum mccann

37. “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

38. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder

39. “Not matter what your sacred or religious book is, it's not how well you know the book, it's how well you're in alignment with the author.” - Steve Maraboli

40. “Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Criss Jami

41. “What's cheaper than a gallon of gas? An ebook. Save a dollar, stay home and read!” - Shandy L. Kurth

42. “I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.” - Dean Wesley Smith

43. “The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” - D.H. Lawrence

44. “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.” - Mikhail Bulgakov

45. “I pity the people who don't like to read, because then they spend their whole lives stuck in this one world and dont get to discover any others.” - Richard Denney

46. “...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times... ...Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on... Quote on the Title Page of "Love TORN Asunder” - Elizabeth Funderbirk

47. “Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.” - David Scheier

48. “The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.” - James Morcan, Lance Morcan

49. “It was unhealthy to get too attached. Such things were best reserved for people who had a life expectancy” - Matthew S. Williams

50. “I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.” - Richard Denney

51. “If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.” - Dani Harper

52. “Originality, not Intelligence, is the sign of a brilliant Author. All the Education in the world won't help someone who can't think for themselves.” - A.M. Sawyer

53. “Be good, or good at it.” - Belo Cipriani

54. “What are the messages that you are entertaining?” - Asa Don Brown

55. “A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.” - Margaret Atwood

56. “I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.” - Renee Miller

57. “No, I will not join your Civil War reenactment troupe.” - Aaron A. A. Smith

58. “For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence?” - Joseph Duda

59. “In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. There was something that someone said at my first Milford, about using style as a covering, but sooner or later you would have to walk naked down the street, that was useful...And then I remembered. It was Harlan Ellison about a decade ago.He said, "Hey. Gaiman. What's with the stubble? Every time I see you, you're stubbly. What is it? Some kind of English fashion statement?""Not really.""Well? Don't they have razors in England for Chrissakes?""If you must know, I don't like shaving because I have a really tough beard and sensitive skin. So by the time I've finished shaving I've usually scraped my face a bit. So I do it as little as possible.""Oh." He paused. "I've got that too. What you do is, you rub your stubble with hair conditioner. Leave it a couple of minutes, then wash it off. Then shave normally. Makes it really easy to shave. No scraping."I tried it. It works like a charm. Best advice from a writer I've ever received.” - Neil Gaiman

60. “...ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.” - Shandy L. Kurth

61. “The first thing I ever learned in roller derby is to fall, and in the author world I believe that same rule applies.” - Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

62. “On having a backup plan: "Always a good plan anytime you want to follow your dream - I love writing, acting, and psychiatry - there are crazy people everywhere which means I can take my career anywhere my dream needs to go.” - Samantha Steele

63. “Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It's harsh and sometimes gritty, but it's real. Why should we tip toe around that?” - Shandy L. Kurth

64. “Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.” - Cathryn Louis

65. “Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.” - Akira Kurosawa

66. “I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.” - Julian Darius

67. “I am so happy that I made someone cry today - don't worry I'm a writer. It's when they make me cry that it's a problem.” - Tina Smith

68. “I write because I love it, not because I excel at it.  But because I write, I shall slowly excel at it.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

69. “The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.” - Anne Tyler

70. “Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.” - Shandy L. Kurth

71. “The best part about being a writer is getting the last word.” - Shannon L. Alder

72. “A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.” - Sandra Chami Kassis

73. “I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.” - Julian Barnes

74. “In the Presence of Love...there are Miracles...Live Love, Give Love and Miracle will follow Miracle and wonders will never cease.” - Deborah Brooks

75. “Art is a captured emotion. When I say this I mean all artists, whether you are a photographer, a writer, or sculptor, you are trying to capture the way someone or something made you feel. As a story teller I am trying to captivate the audience and allow them to feel just a small portion of the emotion I am desperately trying to preserve.” - Tommy Tran

76. “No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

77. “Artistry exists in everyone. What makes it blossom is a soul's personal desire to find an outlet for expression.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

78. “The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could have been captured in words.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

79. “ولكن ألا ترين أن علةالبلاء فى الكلام ، كل واحد منا لديه عالم كامل فى نفسه ، و كل واحد منا له عالمه الخاص ! فكيف يفهم بعضنا بعضا أيها السادة إذا كنت أضع فى كلماتى التى أقولها معانى و قيم الأشياء كما أفهمها فى عالمى أنا ، بينما يفترض من يستمع إلى إن كلماتى لها المعانى و القيم الخاصة بعالمه هو ، نحن نظن أننا سوف نتقابل ، و الواقع أننا لن نتقابل أبدا !” - Luigi Pirandello

80. “To fight discouragement, remind yourself of the basics: I can write.I have the opportunity to do so. I love what I write. Now smile and be thankful.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

81. “I love when I finish reading a chapter that I wrote and my cheeks hurt from smiling and all I can utter is, 'Wow.'” - Richelle E. Goodrich

82. “Psalm 37:44 Delight thyself also in the LORD: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” - LaNina King

83. “An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.” - Chris Everheart

84. “The heart is a place with worm holes made by feelings you aren't supposed to have but do.” - Elizabeth Scott

85. “When I sit down to write I actually ask myself, 'Who do you want to be today?'” - Richelle E. Goodrich

86. “I would make a HORRIBLE outlaw. I can plan the crime perfectly, but I'd also need to plan the outcomes to make it work.” - Michelle M. Pillow

87. “I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say.” - Michelle M. Pillow

88. “Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.” - Michelle M. Pillow

89. “My cat mocks me frequently. It's the universe's way of keeping me from getting too big of an ego.” - Michelle M. Pillow

90. “People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.” - Michelle M. Pillow

91. “Advice from a Romance Writer: Guys, make your woman feel pretty even on an 'off' day. Trust me, good things will come of it.” - Michelle M. Pillow

92. “The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.” - Shandy L. Kurth

93. “Creative writing is your ability to develop your inner tension, your libido, your supply of energy and electric charge, turning the charge into an image or thought, and wording the thought, thus contributing all the activity of your mind to the immortal culture of humankind and subsequently to your own immortality.” - Lara Biyuts

94. “Fairy tales are make believe and reality sucks, but I happen to live in both worlds.” - Emily Hodson

95. “You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.” - Jude Deveraux

96. “Preserve your own mystery. We live in an age of social media and what seems like extreme sharing of personal details. I would beg to differ that these revelations are not honest truths but more self-branding. Whatever the case, save a little bit, or a lot, for yourself. If you run around naked all the time, when the storm hits, you’ll have no raincoat.” - Susan Kirschbaum

97. “Life's too short, drive it like ya stole it!” - Debra L. Hartmann

98. “Make your problems becomeopportunities instead ofobstacles.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

99. “Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.” - Lara Biyuts

100. “I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.” - Rodman Philbrick

101. “A well-developed and versed character will write the story for you.” - A.R. Voss

102. “Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says "i remember you. I am glad you are here again".” - D.A. Botta

103. “I have yet to find that one perfect phrase that epitomizes all the mysteries of the universe. Luckily, I doubt to ever pen it in this lifetime, for then the seeking ends; miserable is the day the adventure ends.” - D.A. Botta

104. “Like any author worth a shit - she parted with a piece of her soul.” - CJ Roberts

105. “I reached into the pile and pulled out a few connected chips and then was about to shove them into my mouth, when I saw what appeared to be the face of an angel sitting next to me. And, if it was in fact my actual guardian angel, then it probably would have been poor form not to offer a few chips to extend an olive branch.” - Phil Wohl

106. “People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait.” - Michelle M. Pillow

107. “I love my career. It is a career. A difficult one that takes many hours and total dedication to my craft. It is also what I was born to do--tell stories and entertain.” - Michelle M. Pillow

108. “For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL” - Michelle M. Pillow

109. “Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.” - Abigail Tarttelin

110. “Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.” - Agatha Christie

111. “Finally... I'm here...” - K. Hari Kumar

112. “There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.” - Carl Henegan

113. “Do not wait and hope to be discovered...make yourself so you cannot be denied!” - Jamie McCall

114. “You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.” - Thomas Harris

115. “Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others feeling after having an experience with you becomes your trademark.” - Jay Danzie

116. “Inspirations are priceless & limitless.” - Jay Danzie