Authorship Quotes

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic? ~ David Byrne

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic. ~ James K. Morrow

Poetic justice, with her lifted scale,
Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.
Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,
Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,
Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day,
Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play:
How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry. ~ Alexander Pope

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man? ~ James Shapiro

There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors. ~ Elena Ferrante

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. ~ Robert Longo

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. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren. ~ Thomas Carlyle

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

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. ~ Mary Shelley

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. ~ John Updike

The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn't encourage more authorship - it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films. ~ Marvin Ammori

I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like. ~ Margaret Cavendish

The men, who labour and digest things most, Will be much apter to despond than boast; For if your author be profoundly good, 'Twill cost you dear before he's understood. ~ Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl Of Roscommon

Strength is not energy; some authors have more muscles than talent. ~ Joseph Joubert

All stories are the sin of their weaver. ~ Miyuki Miyabe

Brevity in writing is
what charity is to all other virtues - righteousness is nothing
without the one,
nor authorship without the other. ~ Sydney Smith

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

Living authors, therefore, are usually, bad companions. If they have not gained character, they seek to do so by methods often ridiculous, always disgusting; and if they have established a character, they are silent for fear of losing by their tongue what they have acquired by their pen
for many authors converse much more foolishly than Goldsmith, who have never written half so well. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

That's the thing about writers -on one hand evrything is sacred to them, but, on the other, nothing really is. ~ Lang Leav

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody. ~ U.G. Krishnamurti

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence. ~ Jane Smiley

[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. ~ Samuel Beckett

All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all originality and authorship is lost. That's why you're seeing superstars like Brad Pitt in THE FIGHT CLUB and Tom Cruise in MAGNOLIA. They're desperately searching for people writing and directing off-formula movies. ~ Paul Schrader

It's the next phase of authorship of this country's energy future. It's gonna come from the people. It's not gonna be deus ex machina or Obama ex machina, or science ex machina. It's gonna be the people. It's not going to be a wind energy company that comes in and saves the day. It's going to be the people who figure this out. ~ Josh Fox

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. ~ August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

You get a good review, and it's like crack. You need another hit. And another. And another. I know authors are like Tinkerbell and generally need applause to survive, but it's a slippery slope. ~ Alexandra Bracken

That an author's work is the mirror of his mind is a position that has led to very false conclusions. If Satan himself were to write a book it would be in praise of virtue, because the good would purchase it for use, and the bad for ostentation. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

If there's a will, there's a way!
I feel larger than LIFE
and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders ... as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night.. ~ Donna Scrima-Black

She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. ~ E. M. Forster

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! ~ Henry James

Authorship is a mania to conquer which no reasons are sufficiently strong. ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

Anonymity is the calling card of the fearful and the courage of the cowardly. ~ Beem Weeks

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. ~ David Knopfler

Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to. ~ Charles Dickens

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. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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

Sound judgment is the ground of writing well. ~ Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl Of Roscommon

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity. ~ Christopher Morley

He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For ~ George Eliot

And hold up to the sun my little taper. ~ Lord Byron

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think. ~ George Gordon Byron

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

Many modern Christians think of the New Testament as a book outside of history, something that was just suddenly there. Historians of Christianity, able to trace its gradual authorship and formation, nonetheless typically find themselves describing this development as an anonymous process, a spontaneous evolution accomplished by the nameless and faceless members of ancient communities of faith ... But when it comes to the origin of the New Testament, we ought to do better, and we can. ~ Jason D. BeDuhn

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

Why I love these words
They are mine
You cannot change that
You cannot rearrange that
Try as you might
You cannot take away
All that they mean to me ~ Maddy Kobar

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years. ~ Aberjhani

To lead and live the life of your dream, you must arise and be in-charge of the authorship of your own destiny. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; - all this comes of Authorship. ~ Lord Byron

So there's a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it. ~ Mark Rylance

Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it. ~ Stefanos Livos

Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance which owes nothing to the subject. ~ Samuel Johnson

The right to be attributed as an author of a work is not merely a copyright, it is every author's basic human right ~ Kalyan C. Kankanala

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. ~ Jonathan Raban

The little mind who loves itself, will wr'te and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Writing - the act of one person giving a piece of their soul to another. ~ J. Spredemann

The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success is dedicated to you, the writer. Authorship requires great courage, creativity, sacrifice and perseverance. You inspire me. ~ Mark Coker

When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way. ~ Misha Collins

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance. ~ Robin Sacredfire

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream? ~ Lewis Mumford

An author who integrates alien signs into the medial surface of his own texts - signs behind which we presume the existence of other powerful, submedial subjects "as authors" - does not increase the comprehensibility of that text. Yet nonetheless, he increases the magical effectiveness this text exudes. Such quotations lead us to presume that the text houses a dangerous, manipulative subject, a magician with enough power to manipulate the signs of other powerful magicians and able to use them strategically for his own purposes. Thus an author who quotes alien signs conveys a stronger impression of powerful authorship than one who ad- vocates precisely his so-called own ideas - which do not interest anybody precisely because they are only his own. It is also well known that one may not quote the same author too often, in which case quoting gradu- ally looses its magical power and begins to irritate the reader. The reason for this gradual decrease of a quote's magical effectiveness is that it looses its strangeness over time and gets integrated into the medial surface of a text, thereby becoming a proper part of it. In order to maintain their magical effect, quotes have to be exchanged constantly so as to continue to maintain the same appearance of foreignness and freshness. The quote functions as a magical fetish that lends the entire text a hidden, submedial power beyond its superficial meaning. ~ Boris Groys

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The truthfulness of 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' is in doubt largely because of uncertainty about its authorship, and, as we have seen, a nearly identical ambiguity surrounds the Appendix. The parallel is significant. Two psychologically oriented critics, Murray Sperber and J. Brooks Bouson, have each pointed out strong resemblances between O'Brien's manipulation of Winston and Orwell's manipulation of the reader. I believe these resemblances extend to the book's handling of its two principal documents. Just as O'Brien plays upon Winston's desire for certain knowledge about Oceania's social and political structure, leading him on with the possibly spurious 'Goldstein' tract, so the story's narrator draws the truth-seeking reader into an Appendix whose truth value cannot be determined. ~ Richard K. Sanderson

You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny. The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand. ~ ~ Irene C. Kassorla

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant. ~ William Hazlitt

For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora. ~ Samuel R. Delany

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors. ~ Voltaire

We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Whatever be the motives which induce men to write,
whether avarice or fame,
the country becomes more wise and happy in which they most serve for instructors. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

No man has all the knowledge on any subject at any time." - Rev., Dr. John Q. Kenzy -

I added to Dr, Kenzy's quote as follows: "So then we can all stand to learn more about what we know or what we think we know." C. R. Lord ~ Dual Authorship.

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

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. ~ Stephen King

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years. ~ Breece D'J Pancake

The name Maldoror, suggesting as it does evil, gold, horror, dawn, sadness etc., seems a curious hybrid, but on reading the work its full title, Les Chants de Maldoror par Le Comte de Lautreamont, seems to contain & imply the constant switches in narrative emphasis-the self as a game (je-jeu) & the author as observer, participant & invisible man-as well as being an inevitable & accurate condensation of, or hint at, the contents. ~ Alexis Lykiard

My music, it breathes. It's the mysticism of sound. I'm a sound seeker, and I'm enthralled with it, by what it can do to change the molecules and uplift people. They feel something when we play. I can't take authorship for that. I can take that I'm in service. ~ Charles Lloyd

if you wish to be the author of reality, which is totally impossible anyway, you will insist on holding onto judgment. You will also use the term with considerable fear, believing that judgment will someday be used against you. To whatever extent it is used against you, it is due only to your belief in its efficacy as a weapon of defense for your own authority. The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority problem," it is always because he believes he is the author of himself, projects his delusion onto others, and then perceives the situation as one in which people are literally fighting him for his authorship. ~ Helen Schucman

We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you. ~ John Green

The unhappy man, who once has trail'd a pen, Lives not to please himself, but other men; Is always drudging, wastes his life and blood, Yet only eats and drinks what you think good. ~ John Dryden

We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If have got my spindle and my distaff ready
my pen and mind
never doubting for an instant that God will send me flax. ~ J.G. Holland

Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live. ~ Sam Harris

my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom-- Soren Kierkegaard "The Point of View for My Work as an Author, (The Single Individual) ~ Soren Kierkagaard

Yes, there are many ways to collect content, but in my experience - the best and most authentic content is one which you speak when you are in moments of flow. You can use any recording device. Do not let the lack of understanding technology slow you down. Ask someone how to turn the damn thing on and record yourself. Remember, you are on a mission to complete the levels within and win a better life for yourself and your family. You owe it to them to overcome these obstacles and to see your way through, not to create excuses. ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. "If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are." "If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted." "If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitievely debunked, we can go right on assuming it's truth." No, you can't. ~ Robert M. Price

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:
A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd
By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade
Below the garden ...
His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship. ~ Edward Gorey

The pen is the tongue of the mind. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for. ~ Julian Darius

A person's zealous act of rebellion leading to their expulsion from a pampered private sanctuary is the first step in self-articulation. Passion requires a struggle. Only by risking committing grievous error can men and women claim authorship for their own destiny. Only the vigorous pursuit of our destiny allows us to discover our authenticity. When we learn to stop resisting our innermost calling, when we accept a lifestyle that makes us experience joy by pursuing our passions and the commonplace acts of being, we discover our pathway to bliss. We must listen to the demands of our spirit; we must break free from self-imposed barriers and cultural impediments that obstruct us from achieving the final manifestation of our spiritual being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food. ~ Joseph Joubert

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. ~ Charles Lamb

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

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it's no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon. ~ Peter S. Beagle

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 ~ Ayn Rand