Author Quotes

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To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me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.

Well, it's not so easy to give an answer when you ask a stupid question!

Hans Christian Andersen

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

Sherwood Anderson

Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite.

These wretched kings,
Of whom all men speak ill, have oft some good in them.

François Andrieux

The men went to Catraeth, swift was their host, the pale mead was their feast and it was their poison.

In order to win, we pay with energy and effort and discipline. If we lose, we pay in disappointment, discontent, and lack of fulfillment.

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.