An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.

We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.

I've heard it expressed before that a writer should read a lot in order to gain insights from experienced or professional others, thus following the general blueprint of the long chain of authors. Well, I guess that I'm a bit odd or a bit unorthodox in that chain, because I just don't read many books. Don't get me wrong, I've read the Bible from cover to cover more than once, and I stay diligent in my studies and research, I just don't read many books by modern day authors.

That would be a ghostwriter worth keeping hold of! But my books are relatively short. A GRRM volume is well over twice as long. I think my main asset is that I write things once. I don't have the draft draft draft disease that some suffer from. I've never deleted a page and rewritten it, some authors rewrite whole chapters or remove or add characters. That's going to make it a lengthy process.

We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised.

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. "Have you thought of a story?" I was asked every morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

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.

I believe the final prize should go to the authors, not the actors. Considering how many great authors die poor in our societies.

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.

People always live badly today; they only live well tomorrow. For the sake of ambition they strive against each other with evil deeds, but the path to glory would be easier to tread by doing good to one another. Although they always speak evil, they hope to be well spoken of themselves; although they do evil, they hope to receive good. We proclaim that we are the authors of good, but that God is the author of evil.

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.

Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?

Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?

They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words. And [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy: on experience, the mistress of their masters.

Good authors worry about genres great authors don't.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom unless they teach virtue they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form as a reader I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort however flawed.

I was one of the first authors to have an active website. I'm totally obsessed with technology. I'm always looking for ways to connect with my readers. I answer all my fan mail.

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.