Author Quotes

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.

Amos Bronson Alcott

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

A little common sense, goodwill, and a tiny dose of unselfishness could make this goodly earth into an earthly paradise.

Richard Aldington

When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it's own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Do no sinful action, speak no angry word; ye belong to Jesus, children of the Lord.

Cecil Frances Alexander

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

Lloyd Alexander

If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don't want to dance, then you're going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango.

That blood which thou hast spill'd, should join you closely in an eternal bond.

Vittorio Alfieri

In the rest of Nirvana all sorrows surcease:
Only Buddha can guide to that city of Peace
Whose inhabitants have the eternal release.

William R. Alger

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

There is no mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. They were not written by Shakespeare at all. They were all written by a total stranger, about whom all we know is that he was called Shakespeare.

Alphonse Allais

Come from your knees to the sermon, and come from the sermon to your knees

A complete and accurately defined list of projects, kept
current and reviewed on at least a weekly basis,
is a master key to stress-free productivity.

The within is ceaselessly becoming the without. From the state of a man's heart doth proceed the conditions of his life; his thoughts blossom into deeds, and his deeds bear the fruitage of character and destiny.

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

Margery Allingham

A man who keeps a diary pays, Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes eventfulthen, His busy hand forgets the pen. Most books, indeed, are records less Of fulness than of emptiness.

William Allingham

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

Dorothy Allison

One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that's a good thing.