105 Quotes About Authorship

[An author is] a fool who, not content with boring everyone around him during his lifetime, insists on boring generations yet to come.

Writing history is like holding a conversation across the ages, responding to people long gone and posing questions to individuals yet born.

I didn't write just one book, I wrote twenty books with the same title and published the last one.

It’s not saying something that’s been said a million times before. It’s saying something that’s been said in a way that feels as if it was missed a million times before.

If you want to be a great writer, be a great editor.

To take a thought, to gingerly package it in a handful of words, and then to deliver it to a person for whom both the thought and the words within which it came are life-saving is writing at its best. Anything else is scribbling at its worst.

Novel-writing has in one respect an affinity to the drama—that time and distance are required to soften for use the harsher features that may be exhibited from real life; that it was almost impossible to bring forward events without touching on their causes; and that any tendency to political discussion, however liberal or applicable, was not to be tolerated in a sort of work which people took up with no other design than to be amused at the least possible expence of thought.

You shouldn't write about your personal life', says the one feeling threatened by the truth to the writer.

In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times.