Dead Authors Quotes

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.

Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.

Books have always been to me like a kind of embalmed mind. The dead may be scattered, and who can find them, but their voices live in the library.

Eventually, all of our impressions will be dead. That's one of my favorite things about Paul F. Tompkins' 'Dead Authors' podcast is to be able to do impressions of people you've never otherwise think to do or get to do. I did Walt Whitman on there, and that was really fun.

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

Library: A place where the dead lie.

My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day.

I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.

I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?

Books are dead men talking.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, — who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, — and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes — each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs — quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.

a lot of trouble has been caused by memoirs. Indiscreet revelations, that sort of thing. People who have been close as an oyster all their lives seem positively to relish causing trouble when they themselves shall be comfortably dead.

I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn't occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn't think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.

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.

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.