Author Legacy Quotes

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

Over the last 20 years, everyone who interviews me feels compelled to ask at least one question about 'The Island of Dr. Moreau.'

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.

Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.

When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels.

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative.

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.'

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

I'm in my late 20s, and people are coming around to it again. I think they're realizing how much this stuff affects them. I think all the time about how much Judy Blume affected me, or Beverly Cleary. And I think that now some people are starting to come around and get more of an appreciation for [my stuff].

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.