The 25 Best Quotes About Authors

In this post from Writers Write, your writing resource, we share a selection of our favourite quotes about authors.

Happy National Author’s Day! The first of November is the day to celebrate your favourite authors. The US Department of Commerce recognised 1 November as National Author’s Day in 1949. (Read more here).

I love this idea. I have found faith, solace, joy, and redemption in the books I have read. From the moment I could read, I was entranced by the magic that existed between the pages of a novel. I am grateful to all the authors who truly made me realise I was not alone.

I wanted to celebrate by putting together a selection of my favourite quotes about authors. I hope you enjoy them.

The 25 Best Quotes About Authors

1. A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. ~Eugene Ionesco
2. All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell
3. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann
4. Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something—a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question—ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness. ~Nadine C. Keels
5. But writers and their woes: they couldn’t be parted. Not for anything. ~Naomi Wood

6. 

   To say that a writer’s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement – it’s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writers build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it. ~David Gerrold

7. Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere. ~Don Roff
8. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton
9. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations. ~Agatha Christie
10. There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up. ~Raymond E. Feist
11. Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. ~Edward Albee

12.   The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac. ~John Lanchester 

13. A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. ~Carlos Ruiz Zafón
14. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favour you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. ~Dorothy Parker
15. Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. ~Robertson Davies
16. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
17. I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. ~V. S. Naipaul
18. It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books. ~Italo Calvino
19. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it. ~Leo Rosten
21. The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic. ~Julian Barnes
22. Either a writer doesn’t want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want. ~Anatole Broyard
23. I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. ~Neil Gaiman
24. The historian records, but the novelist creates. ~E. M. Forster
25. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand. ~Siri Hustvedt

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by Amanda Patterson

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to read:

1. The 35 Best Quotes About Creating Characters
2. The 27 Best Quotes About Bookshops
3. The Top 12 Quotes On Writing Memoirs
4. My 15 Favourite Quotes On Grammar
5. The Top 10 Writer’s Block Quotes
6. 50 Motivational Quotes On Writing

Top Tip: Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop.