Like author, like book. [ Proverb ]

No author ever spared a brother;
Wits are gamecocks to one another. [ Gay ]

Could he with reason murmur at his case
Himself sole author of his own disgrace? [ Cowper ]

None but an author knows an author's cares. [ Cowper ]

None but an author knows an author's cares,
Or fancy's fondness for the child she bears. [ Cowper ]

And choose an author as you choose a friend. [ Wentworth Dillon ]

Nature is a volume of which God is the author. [ Harvey ]

No author is a man of genius to his publisher. [ Heine ]

Chance is blind and is the sole author of creation. [ Saintine ]

The laborer is the author of all greatness and wealth. [ U. S. Grant ]

An author can have nothing truly his own but his style. [ Disraeli ]

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works. [ Voltaire ]

He who proposes to be an author should first be a student. [ Dryden ]

Music is a gift of the, Author of Nature to the whole human race. [ Hogarth ]

Where is any author in the world teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? [ William Shakespeare ]

Who does not more admire Cicero as an author than as a consul of Rome? [ Addison ]

It is easy to criticise an author, but it is difficult to appreciate him. [ Vauvenargues ]

Can we not seek the author of life but in the obscure labyrinth of theology? [ Voltaire ]

The only happy author in this world fs he who is below the care of reputation. [ Washington Irving ]

A chaste and lucid style is indicative of the same personal traits in the author. [ Hosea Ballou ]

No author can be as moral as his works, as no preacher is as pious as his sermons. [ Jean Paul ]

One hates an author that is all author; fellows in foolscap uniform, turned up with ink. [ Byron ]

Every author, in some degree, portrays himself in his works even be it against his will. [ Goethe ]

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it [ Carlyle ]

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. [ Thackeray ]

A creation of importance can be produced only when its author isolates himself; it is ever a child of solitude. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

It is quite as much of a trade to make a book as to make a clock. It requires more than mere genius to be an author. [ Bruyere ]

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous: or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant. [ Hazlitt ]

It is scarce possible at once to admire and excel an author, as water rises no higher than the reservoir it falls from. [ Bacon ]

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature but what he was forced to ascribe it to many inconsistencies. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

You think much too well of me as a man. No author can be as moral as his works, as no preacher is as pious as his sermons. [ Richter ]

When we meet with a natural style, we are surprised and delighted, for we expected to find an author, and we have found a man. [ Pascal ]

Nothing is so beneficial to a young author as the advice of a man whose judgment stands constitutionally at the freezing-point. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews to challenge every new author. [ Longfellow ]

Love is the eldest, noblest, and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and happiness after death. [ Plato ]

There is not less wit, nor less invention, in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. [ Pierre Boyle ]

Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me. [ Goethe ]

Every reader reads himself out of the book that he reads; nay, has he a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with the author's. [ Goethe ]

He who would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind and see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible. [ Goethe ]

He that would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind to see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence. His name, like a shuttlecock, must be beat backward and forward, or it falls to the ground. [ Johnson ]

The style of an author is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

If the secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader. [ Thackeray ]

To know by rote is no knowledge: it is only a retention of what is intrusted to the memory. That which a man truly knows may be disposed of without regard to the author, or reference to the book from whence he had it. [ Montaigne ]

Generally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing. [ Addison ]

I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts. [ W. B. Clulow ]

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. But in this respect every author is a Spartan, being more ashamed of the discovery than of the depredation. [ Colton ]

There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. [ Henry Clay ]

A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking. [ Addison ]

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images: we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately. [ La Bruyere ]

Some will read only old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern publications: others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old. Some will not read a book because they know the author: others would also read the man. [ Disraeli ]

A good author, and one who writes carefully, often discovers that the expression of which he has been in search without being able to discover it, and which he has at last found, is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and which seems as if it ought to have presented itself at once, without effort, to the mind. [ Bruyere ]

Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book, they buy with it the right to abuse the author. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

A book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an imperfect image, - the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual Venus, - whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons, - breathes the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever. [ Willmott ]

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. [ Ruskin ]