Authorship Quotes

Authorship Quote of the day

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

There are three difficulties in authorship; to write any thing worth the publishing — to find honest men to publish it — and to get sensible men to read it.

Whatever hath been written shall remain, Nor be erased nor written o'er again; The unwritten only still belongs to thee: Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be.

Let it (what you have written) be kept back until the ninth year. [Lat., Nonumque prematur in annum.]

I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice. [Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question... at completely different levels.

The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.

If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer . . . is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

Who left nothing of authorship untouched, and touched nothing which he did not adorn. [Lat., Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit; nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.]

Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.

And hold up to the sun my little taper.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

He who proposes to be an author should first be a student.

That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he has published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.

All authors to their own defects are blind.

Ye who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities. [Lat., Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam Viribus.]

Nothing is so beneficial to a young author as the advice of a man whose judgment stands constitutionally at the freezing-point.

From the moment one sets up for an author, one must be treated as ceremoniously, that is as unfaithfully, "as a king's favorite or a king.

There's as much great authorship in the filmmaker community as in the literary community, and I'd love to welcome more filmmakers into the fold.

The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.

I have observed that vulgar readers almost always lose their veneration for the writings of the genius with whom they have had personal intercourse.

Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.

But, inevitably, as he [Kierkegaard] approaches what we might call his Christocentric climax many readers drop off. Many scholars just leave that part of his authorship alone.

Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.

Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.

I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.

There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness; it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

All stories are the sin of their weaver.

The calling of an author is more than just to entertain, but also to share ones experiences with the world.

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.