Best Authors Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“How to win in life:”

“Which is the true nightmare, the horrific dream that you have in your sleep or the dissatisfied reality that awaits you when you awake?”

“There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!”

“i would rather have”

“. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.”

“Love what is simple and beautiful.”

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth”

“At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.”

“Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? Authors disagree. Authors are human and fallible and foolish. Stories are lies after all, tales of people who never existed and the things that never actually happened to them. Why should we read them? Why should we care?”

“Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean.”

“...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.”

“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.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“I've been thinking a lot about what we lost when we lost Kurt Vonnegut, and the main thing that keeps coming to mind is that we lost a moral voice. We lost a very reasonable and credible--though not to say staid or toothless--voice who helped us know how to live.”

“The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.”

“If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.”

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.”

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”

“Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.”

“Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”

“What is your advice to young writers?”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”