The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces nor slander us behind our backs nor intrude upon our privacy nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Then of course there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

I've had a lot of very positive feedback about those stories and seem to have struck upon something that most people feel. I can also tap dance and don't know many other authors who can.

All those authors there most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side that's the prose side that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation unless he has never read them.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances exist only in the imagination.

Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!) but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

Old wood best to burn old wine to drink old friends to trust and old authors to read.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors nor even in its newspapers or inventors but always most in the common people.

I thought it was amazing to work with authors to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.