Writer Quotes by Fiction & Nonfiction Authors

Andre Gide was a French author, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide has always appealed to different audiences: a traditional psychological novelist to some and an innovative modern writer to others; he was a major literary critic, social crusader, and spokesperson for homosexual rights, at a time in our social history when doing so was extremely controversial. Although The Roman Catholic Church placed his works on the ‘Index of Forbidden Books’ in 1952, Gide's search for self - the underlying theme of his several works - remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions and his books influenced a generation of young writers, including the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”

“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the sufferings and joy of others.”

“Art is collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.”

“If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

An innovative force in American journalism, Ellen Goodman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist. Known for her keen intellect and wit, Goodman’s syndicated column appears in more than 440 newspapers. Five collections of Ellen Goodman’s newspaper columns have been published: Close to Home (1979), At Large (1981), Keeping in Touch (1985), Making Sense (1989), and Value Judgments (1993). She also authored a book, Turning Points (1979), which explored how Americans coped with changes brought about by the feminist movement.

“You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.”

“The things we hate about ourselves aren’t more real than things we like about ourselves.”

“If there’s a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there’s a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshiped there for some time.”

“In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.”

“Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe and aren’t even aware of.”

“I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.”

“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Both Bonnett and I first listened to Garrison Kiellor’s morning radio while getting ready for our day of high school in Little Falls, Minnesota. It was aired starting in 1969 on Minnesota Public Radio and broadcast from St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN. In 1974 Kiellor started his live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which expanded his use of live music in the radio studio to a larger scale production. Like his initial morning radio show, the Saturday evening broadcasts feature an eclectic blend of music and humor.

As a writer, he has had many articles, columns and short stories published by magazines including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, various newspapers and the e-zine, Salon.com. He also has a number of novels and short story collections in print. Keillor’s writing work now spans the mediums of print, audio and video - with his specials on DVD’s and the Robert Altman movie about A Prairie Home Companion, featuring the actors Kevin Klein, Lilly Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrrelson, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones, Mia Rudolph and John C. Reilly (Garrison played the part of GK) – but also spans a variety of business venues which now include the opening of his bookstore in the basement level of a downtown St. Paul, MN restaurant in 2006. We hope to visit it soon to see if “Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop.” lives up to the store’s promising name. While we bet it probably will, we wouldn’t want to say for sure until we’ve seen the store for ourselves. When we do, we’ll keep all of you posted.

“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.”

“A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.”

“God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.”

“I'm not busy... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who dropped the Jr. portion of his name after his father’s death, was and eminent American writer in the tradition of Mark Twain. He grew up in Indianapolis and is the son of a family of prominent architects. He wrote for his high school and Cornell University college newspaper. The University of Chicago eventually permitted him to use his novel, Cat’s Cradle, for his thesis to complete his masters degree.

Vonnegut enlisted in the army in 1942, and was sent to two universities for training in mechanical engineering, and then deployed to the European battlefields of WW2, where he became separated from his battalion, caught by the German Army and ended up as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. While there, Allied forces bombed Dresden, despite the fact that it only had cultural treasures but no military significance. Along with his fellow prisoners, he was sent to bury bodies after the bombing. Vonnegut reported: “But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.” He was one of only 7 allied prisoners of war to survive the bombing. He wrote about his eyewitness experience in his most widely known work, Slaughter House Five, of which a movie was also made.

He wrote novels, short stories and essays. On a personal note, Bonnett and I have read most all his works and found them to be bitingly funny and poignant commentaries on hypocrisy in a multitude political, social and personal of guises.

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.”

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

“I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

An American writer and humorist, Roy Blount Jr. is also an actor, reporter, and musician with the “Rock Bottom Remainders,” a rock band composed entirely of his fellow writers including Steven King, Dave Barry, Matt Groening and Amy Tan. He is featured regularly as a panelist on the NPR news & comedy quiz show, Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me. On the show, Blount frequently reduces the panel to hysterics with his bizarre statements and answers to questions.

He has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion frequently (Garrison Keilor has said, “Roy Blount's stuff makes me laugh so hard, sometimes I have to go sit in a room and shut the door.”), and on the CBS Morning Show, Tonight Show, David Letterman Show, Good Morning America, Today Show, Larry King & Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

“If a cat spoke, it would say things like “Hey, I don’t see the problem here.”

“A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but cat’s eyes don’t even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog’s eyes look human except less guarded. A dog will look at you as if to say, “What do you want me to do for you? I’ll do anything for you.” Whether a dog can in fact, do anything for you if you don’t have sheep (I never have) is another matter. The dog is willing.”

“A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.”

“Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.”

Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century. Commonly referred to as ‘the father of psychoanalysis’, his work has been highly influential - popularizing such notions as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism - while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as philosophy, and psychology, literature and film.

The book that made his reputation in the profession, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), is an indefinable masterpiece… part autobiography, part dream analysis, part theory of the mind, and part history of contemporary Vienna.

“Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”

“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.”

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

In over 18 months of constant writing, made possible through generous donations of food and financial help from most everyone in his small Columbian town, Gabriel García Márquez wrote his groundbreaking novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1968. Over 36 million copies have been sold worldwide with translations into over two-dozen languages. He was awarded the1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and 3 other international prizes for his works. Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success.

His novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, is now a 2007 motion picture directed by Mike Newell, which tells the story of a love triangle between Fermina Daza (played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her two suitors, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Doctor Juvenal Urbino. (Benjamin Bratt) The movie spans 50 years, from 1880 to 1930.

On his own initiative, García Márquez convinced Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Shakira, who hails from the nearby city of Barranquilla, Columbia, to provide two songs for the film. It will be the first time that a Garcia Márquez novel has been made into a movie by a Hollywood studio. The film is due to be released in the USA on November 16th, 2007.

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.”

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

Creator of the ‘Harry Potter’ fantasy series, J.K. Rowling has sold over 335 million books, now translated into 65 languages. Her last 4 have been the fastest selling books in history. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury, felt that their target audience of young boys might be reluctant to read books by a female author and requested that Joanne Rowling use her initials… thus J.K. Rowling.

Harry Potter is a global brand, now worth over 15 billion dollars. ‘Forbes Magazine’ named Rowling as the person to ever become a billionaire by writing books. Rowling is now a philanthropist who gives generously to antipoverty and reading programs as well as the MS Society of Great Britain (her mother had multiple sclerosis). Queen Elizabeth II inducted her into the ‘Order of the British Empire’. In 2006, the asteroid (43844) ‘Rowling’ was named in her honor and the newly discovered Pachycephalosaurid dinosaur, Dracorex hogwartsia, currently at the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, was named in honor of her sorcerer’s world.

“I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.”

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve. I was determined to try. I was determined to try because, frankly, my life was such a mess at this point, what – what was the worst that could happen? Everyone turn me down? Big deal.”

“One of my regrets would be that I will never again have the pleasure of sneaking into a cafe, any cafe I like, sitting down and diving into my world and no one knowing what I am doing and no one bothering about me and being totally anonymous, that was fantastic.”

“I am not trying to influence anyone into black magic. That is the very last thing I’d want to do. I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

The Algerian born French writer and philosopher, Albert Camus, was the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first being Rudyard Kipling. Camus is often associated with existentialism although he rejected the term, preferring to be known only as an author and a thinker. His life was made challenging by recurring tuberculosis, two marriages marred with infidelity, intermittent employment as a journalist and was ended prematurely by an auto accident. He was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II. For the 1st quote, he wrote on the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers:

“Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

“Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

Author of 14 books, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was an eloquent writer as well as a famous aviator. She and her husband, Charles Lindbergh, contributed greatly to aviation earning her the ‘Hubbard Medal’ by the National Geographic Society and the ‘Aerospace Explorer Award’ by the ‘Women In Aerospace’ organization. Her books, diaries and poetry span themes of travel, aviation, environmental issues and political perspectives.

“The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.”

“For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.”

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”