Calgary Author Quotes

Don't expect the answers overnight. This isn't a fortune cookie.
- The Duke to Delaine; discussing dating after divorce, Chapter 9 ~ Delaine Moore

The results of five experiments involving more than a thousand participants showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to detect and understand other people's emotions. But it can't be any sort of fiction. The researchers distinguished between "popular fiction" (where the author leads you by the hand as a reader) and "literary fiction" (in which you must find your own way and fill in the gaps). Instead of being told why a certain character behaves as they do, you have to figure it out yourself. That way, the book becomes not just a simulation of a social experience, it is a social experience. ~ Meik Wiking

The author says people are guilty of wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck. ~ T.H. White

I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel - to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

See it, learn it, do it ALL. ~ Jamie McCall

Lately it's started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-meaning. It hasn't taken a whole lot of common sense, given the evidence of the last few years, to puzzle out the heartlessness of unregulated capitalism, and yet our political class has embraced even more fervently the notion of every man for himself, even given the ever-growing numbers such a philosophy leaves behind. ~ Jim Shepard

One difference between the Bible and the Constitution is that we can still talk to the author of the Bible to discover original intent. ~ Ron Brackin

In my world," said Posy, "authors write stories, and the characters do whatever the author tells them. It's not like this--the characters don't have minds and lives of their own."
"How do you know this?" was Caris' surprising reply. The corner of her mouth turned up in a playful smile. "You do not see the characters when the pages of the book are shut. Is there never a time when you read a book for the second time and you notice something that you didn't remember from the first time? Or hear a story told, and every time it is told it grows and changes in the telling? Change is the nature of everything. ~ Ashlee Willis

The pain
breached through the indolence of mind. But the dizziness
made reactions very slow and stretched, like a novice stage
actor stretching his death scene for missing queue of actors,
leaving audience in splits. ~ Abhish

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do. ~ Terry Eagleton

Bah, he still saw the same stupidity. The image of the hanged man in the farming community of Yondern flashed through his mind. Now there was a war brewing between the Steelwielders and some foreign religion. More mindless loss over beliefs and mythology. But.. he could not deny the noble features in his companions. Although Perfidian was too blithe and Elaina too didactic, they had risked their life to do what was right. He did owe them his life. He could not deny the nobility he saw in many different people, bits and pieces of nobility that shined through under pressure. The guards who risked their lives to protect the villagers, Markham who flew at the dangerous dwarf, swords flashing; even an Eruthian merchant who stopped in his journey to share tales with complete strangers'. ~ T.P. Grish

There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here) ~ Mary Norris

Youngsters deserve no opinions. ~ Carla H. Krueger

There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it ... others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two. ~ Carl Henegan

I don't think there's a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that's what the best writing does, that's what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It's not about you. Whether you're a genius or an idiot savant. It's about the work. The work is more important than you. So it's not about back-claps and plaudits and "isn't that author smart." It's about, "this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I'm lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well." Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways. ~ Colin Fleming

There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream.
Author unknown ~ Shelley K. Wall

An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material - the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

When I write, regardless of what I'm writing, or how I approach the writing task, I've got this image or shape or feeling inside me somewhere, a sort of embroidery pattern, a sort of magic-pencil outline, a sort of distant melody." - Pamela Mordecai ~ Pamela Mordecai

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

Cosmic Ordering is a licence to print money. ~ Stephen Richards

I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece. ~ Rose Kennedy

I keep telling the screws over and over again, 'If you treat a young boy in prison like a dog, keep him in a cell that is like a cage and constantly beat him and bully him, that boy is going to grow up hating yous and the system.' The only thing on his mind will be revenge, maybe it is not revenge on the screws that so frequently bullied and tortured him, but in the boy's eyes he is getting revenge on the uniform, as it all means the same thing in the boy's or man's eyes. ~ Stephen Richards

The Saga of Dharmapuri is one of the great works of modern Indian literature. ( ... ) Set against Vijayan's heroic and scatological Candide
originally written in Malayalam and finely translated into English by the author
the timidity of our own English talent for political satire is embarrassingly laid bare. For this is dangerous stuff, and cut close to the bone. ( ... ) Fiercest of all is Vijayan's Voltairean recoil from Indian cringing to power. ~ David Selbourne

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. ~ Sven Birkerts

This didn't sound good. It sounded like the optimism was escaping from him. ~ S.A. Tawks

Be The Leader, Author, & Star of Your Own Life Story! ~ Naryza

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

<3 Walking for world peace is not very easy but wow does it do good for your soul :)

Timothy Pina
Author
www.walkitoutfundraisers.com ~ Timothy Pina

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust. ~ Oscar Wilde

Between giant spiders and meeting Edmund Ellis did I have a chance, Ms Rainn? ~ S.A. Tawks

I believe the writer ... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author. ~ Maxwell Perkins

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
or want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horse shoe nail. ~ Unknown Author 386

But what is a book? And what will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object? What will we gain, and more importantly, what will we lose? Old-fashioned habits, perhaps. A certain sense of the sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilisation that has made it our holy of holies. A peculiar intimacy between the author and reader, which the context of hypertextuality is bound to damage. A sense of existing in a self-contained world that the book and, along with it, certain ways of reading used to represent. ~ Jean-Philippe De Tonnac

Truth is always wilder than fiction. Hold on to your hats and enjoy this page turning
look inside the world of sports betting from a good girl gone bad for love.
Laura Atchison, Author of What Would A Wise Woman Do? ~ Laura Atchison

No one can command over the images of your mind but an Author can and if you won't believe on me then read my book. ~ Prakhar Srivastav

They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again - not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in a irreparable world, where everything had already been lost. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

The author says one of the sources of resilience is the ability to measure and perceive early warning signs so as to adapt. ~ Andrew Zolli

My master's visualizations were so powerful their condensation into matter was mere signature. Donald Walters, formerly Kriyananda, author of The Path about his guru Yogananda. ~ Goswami Kriyananda

If you see my fifteen minutes of fame let me know I've been searching for it for years ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Think about yourself.
You are here because...
Your dad met your mom.
Then your dad and mom conceived you.
So a particular egg in your mom
Joined a particular sperm from your dad
Which could only happen because not one of your direct ancestors, going all the way back to the beginning of life itself, died before passing on his or her genes...
So what are the chances of you happening?
Of you being here?

Author and blogger Dr. Ali Binazir did the calculations last spring and decided that the chances of anyone existing are one in 102,685,000. In other words, as this infographic figures it, you are totally improbable. ~ Robert Krulwich

He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author. ~ Andrei Makine

decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book. ~ Richard Dawkins

You are the author of your own life ... Don't let others define it for you. Real power comes by doing what you are meant to be doing, and doing it well. ~ Oprah Winfrey

We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation. ~ Alan Sokal

The same zeal and guts with which you were persistent not to forgive is the same zeal and enthusiasm with which you should be able to open up a new relationship with your partner, loved one or friend, one that is founded on commitment and dedication. ~ Stephen Richards

It is easy to criticize an author, but difficult to appreciate him. ~ Luc De Clapiers

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible ~ Arthur Schopenhauer