Sole Author Quotes

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice! ~ Marquis De Sade

Could he with reason murmur at his case, Himself sole author of his own disgrace? ~ William Cowper

Let me not be so vain to think that I'm the sole author of my victories and a victim of my defeats. ~ Ze Frank

God holds the copyright, as the sole author of life. ~ Gift Gugu Mona

It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Imagine then the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week. ~ Susanna Clarke

How Did You Become an Author?!?!?! ~ Vincent Crook

To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. ~ George MacDonald

Pagan philosophers set up reason as the sole guide of life, of wisdom and conduct; but Christian philosophy demands of us that we surrender our reason to the Holy Spirit; and this means that we no longer live for ourselves, but that Christ lives and reigns within us (Rom 12:1; Eph 4:23; Gal 2:20). ~ John Calvin

Always walk as if you're running late, it's healthier. ~ Benny Bellamacina

The labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader. ~ Agnes Repplier

But as an escort it's our duty to hold their attention and play with their heads. The one between their ears and the one in their pants. ~ S.K. Logsdon

Have you ever been reading a book and found yourself having to pause for a second and read a certain part again because the author has summed up in a few sentences exactly what you were feeling at a certain point in your life; a feeling you'd never been able to put into words before and there it suddenly is laid out before you, written by someone you've never even met? It's kind of a tragically wonderful feeling. ~ Emily May

You can't screw up your own suicide and then expect the universe to give you presents wrapped in the skin of a wonderful boy. That's just not the way it works. ~ Heather Demetrios

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author. ~ John Keats

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What in inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put a pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honour and money are not to be found in the same purse--honra y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I'm not an author, but before I became mayor, I wasn't a mayor. ~ Ed Koch

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author. ~ Sarah Zettel

Language is a tool for communicating and not a barrier to writing ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

I have inflammation of the imagination. ~ Lera Auerbach

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame. ~ Unknown Author 724

I've found that the most engaging and satisfying author events I've done are with other people, where the conversation is spontaneous. I think that is by far the better way to introduce and promote a book. ~ Gayle Forman

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The practice of forgiving is a sequential practice that begins with excusing someone. ~ Stephen Richards

I thought of calling this piece "In Memoriam," because "in memoriam" has always suggested a place to me - Memoriam, Oklahoma, say, or Memoriam, Tennessee - and because, to my tinker's brain, "in memoriam," sounds like "in memory am." Which I am, now more than ever. Lost, basically, wandering that ancestral home, all polished wood and anecdote, wishing that I could unload it somehow, knowing I never will. Like it or not, I have an investment in Memoriam now. My father's casket between the potted palms is the cornerstone. Welcome home, kid.

It's an odd, slightly ghostly predicament. Lacking brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with my mother's memory having long ago lost any trace of me, I find myself the sole surviving owner of ten thousand names, stories, jokes, associations - that time the raccoon reached up through the knothole in the cabin floor when I was four; those Friday nights when the three of us would watch "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; that evening, a memorable night in 1966, when my dad, with his professorial air and his Czech accent and his horn-rims, put on my mother's shoulder-length blond wig on a dare and went out to pick up the pizza - that mean nothing, except that they were the soil of our lives. ~ Mark Slouka

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else. ~ Colum McCann

My reviews of the above books appear in my series, A Literary Cavalcade. Reviews are listed alphabetically by author across the six volumes. ~ Robert A. Parker

Write what you want to write and would like to read, not for any invisible audience. Your readers will find you. ~ David John Griffin

If you are in a prison of fear ... break out! ~ Stephen Richards

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL MYSTERY AUTHOR ~ Henry Kisor

The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation. ~ Orson Squire Fowler

There is nothing more amazing than being with the one you love. ~ Shilpi

A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir. ~ Tony Blankley

Music is a story and you're the author ~ Rachel Van Dyken

Time, as they say, is the sole determinant of the strength and the weakness. ~ Deepak Rana

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself.
Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self."
"The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in so ~ Michael Finkel

Why is joy not considered a fit subject for an artist? ~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

All stories come to an end. That moment when we sigh and close the book, perhaps sit back in our chair and rest our palm over the cover, is met with quixotic emotions. On the one hand, we're satisfied if the author successfully tied up loose ends, turned a memorable phrase and rewarded the hero's moral choice with his heart's desire. Yet we're also saddened that the adventure is over. Sometimes when we see that we only have a few pages left we slow down, savoring each word, staving off the ~ Mary Alice Monroe

The business of a Political Economist is neither to recommend nor to dissuade, but to state general principles, which it is fatal to neglect, but neither advisable, nor perhaps practicable, to use as the sole, or even the principal, guides in the actual conduct of affairs. ~ Nassau William Senior

Spread sunshine and inspiration. ~ Juliet M. Sampson

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digi ~ Jaron Lanier

As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him you like what he wrote. ~ Pierre Bayard

Here is a man who was resigned to his fate, who was walking to the scaffold and about to die like a coward, that's true, but at least he was about to die without resisting and without recriminations. Do you know what gave him that much strength? Do you know what consoled him? It was the fact that another man was to die like him, that another man was to die before him! Put two sheep in the slaughter-house or two oxen in the abattoir and let one of them realize that his companion will not die, and the sheep will bleat with joy, the ox low with pleasure. But man, man whom God made in His image, man to whom God gave this first, this sole, this supreme law, that he should love his neighbour, man to whom God gave a voice to express his thoughts - what is man's first cry when he learns that his neighbour is saved? A curse. All honour to man, the masterpiece of nature, the lord of creation! ~ Alexandre Dumas

and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin. ~ Robert M. Price

You must learn not to rely so heavily on others. Only then will help come when you truly need it. ~ S.A. Tawks

Blank pages are like monsters that haunt my dreams until I feed them words. ~ V.M. Sawh

If you want your life to be a magnificent story
Then begin by realizing that you are the author
And everyday you have the opportunity to write a new page ~ Mark Houlahan

I know that by the time I was in middle school, Andre Norton was definitely my favorite author. ~ Martha Wells