Authorship Quotes - Page 6

• There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Kings, Writing, Men

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• Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.

  Jonathan Swift

  Book, Omission, Relation

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• Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.

  Joseph Addison

  Materials

  Joseph Addison (1721). “The Spectator, no. 507-600. The Guardian. By Nestor Ironside, esq; The Lover. The present state of the war, and the necessity of an argumentation, considered. The late tryal and conviction of Count Tariff. The Whig-examiner. The Free-holder. Of the Christian religion. The names of the subscribers”, p.454

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• The authors who affect contempt for a name in the world put their names to the books which they invite the world to read.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Book, Names, World

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• This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Imagination, Miracle, Mind

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• My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

  Henry Adams

  Dog, Men, Rivers

  Henry Adams (1951). “Selected letters”, New York, Farrar

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• There's as much great authorship in the filmmaker community as in the literary community, and I'd love to welcome more filmmakers into the fold.

  Nina Jacobson

  Community, Welcome, Filmmaker

  "'Hunger Games' Producer Nina Jacobson on Movie Backstory; Firing from Disney (Q&A)". Interview with Jay A. Fernandez, www.hollywoodreporter.com. March 15, 2012.

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• He who proposes to be an author should first be a student.

  John Dryden

  Firsts, Students, Should

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• O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Book, Writing

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.129, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Intellectual, Mind, Territory

  Thomas Carlyle (1845). “The Life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an Examination of His Works”, p.56, London : Chapman and Hall

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• There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect; compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate, every one who dares to write has reason to fear.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Fate, Names

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1828). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.128

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• People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.

  Samuel Johnson

  Taken, Men, People

  Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (1825). “The Table Talk of Dr. Johnson: Comprising Opinions and Anecdotes of Life and Literature, Men, Manners, and Morals”, p.20

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• 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

  Lucky, Genius, Sparrows

  Samuel Johnson (1803). “The Lives of the Most Prominent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works”, p.175

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• How many great ones may remember'd be,
  Which in their days most famously did flourish,
  Of whom no word we hear, nor sign now see,
  But as things wip'd out with a sponge do perish,
  Because the living cared not to cherish
  No gentle wits, through pride or covetize,
  Which might their names forever memorize!

  Edmund Spenser

  Pride, Names, Forever

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• A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

  Bill Bryson

  Two, Age, Leisure

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