Lord Byron Quotes

With each award we get, we become a little bit more overrated. That's what it feels like.

I get a lot of credit I don't deserve.

If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

For an author just starting out, you've got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.

Think of a book special to you, and how much bleaker and poorer your life would be if that one writer had not existed - if that one writer had not, a hundred times or a thousand, made the choice to write. You're going to be that one writer one day for somebody you may never meet. Nobody can write that book you're going to write - that book that will light up and change up a life - but you.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.

Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.

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.

Vacations prove that a life of pleasure is overrated.

The feeling is that Fidel Castro's much bigger than he actually is.

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

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.

I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.

Following instructions is overrated.