#Author Quotes

“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.”

“A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.”

“I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.”

“From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.”

“The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.”

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”

“They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.”

“I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.”

“You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.”

“Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.”

“I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”

“For nearly twenty years I have been a published author... But I have never yet seen a book of mine offered for sale in a shop window.”

“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”

“Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”

“The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.”

“When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over”

“The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.”