Myrtle Reed Quotes

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

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.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

An author departs, he does not die.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.