Anthony Trollope Quotes

Authors should be honored only for their works.

Social media buzz can lead to huge successes when people spread the word about something they love and want to share. But authors creating their own buzz? Making their own noise? It's hard to make a lot of noise on our own about our own work. Except, sadly, negative noise.

Being influential is not the mark of a great book.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

The balls do not make a writer.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

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

I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

Miss Edgeworth and Mme. de Stael have proved that there is no sex in style; and Mme. la Roche Jacqueline, and the Duchesse d'Angouleme have proved that there is no sex in courage.

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

There's an old press-agents' slogan that's good advice: Don't read your publicity - weigh it.

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

How many books there are whose reputation is made that would not obtain it were it now to make?

I wish I could say confidently that pacing remains my weak point, if you could talk about your own stuff without sounding like you're self-obsessed. But I think you kind of have to be.

If I wanted to make over my image, I could have given 10,000 interviews in the last 10 years. I haven't done anything wrong that I need to make up for. I am what I am in front of the world.

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.