500 Famous Writers Quotes | Top Author Quotes

Famous Writers Best Quotes

Literature cannot be created without writers. The authors are creators of various pieces of literature around the world. The writer produces various forms of literary art and creative writing such as poetry, plays, screenplays, novels, short stories, and essays as well as various reports and news articles that may be of interest to the public. The writings of the authors make a special contribution to society. An author is someone who uses different writing styles and techniques to convey his ideas.

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The great author makes a special contribution to our lives through their writings. Their writings always inspire us. In this article, we discuss the popular quotes of five great world-famous authors. Their writings give us encouragement, courage, and inspiration in different situations in our lives.

Famous Author Quotes by William Shakespeare

“Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well, and yet words are not deeds.”

“In time we hate that which we often fear.”

“Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.”

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”

“Boldness be my friend.”

“The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.”

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

“What is past is prologue.”

“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.”

“In struggling with misfortunes lies the true proof of virtue.”

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.”

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

“Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.”

“Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.”

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

“Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.”

“Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.”

“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”

“One may smile, and smile, be a villain.”

“Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

“Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.”

“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

“Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners.”

“The tempter or the tempted, who sins most.”

“Men should be what they seem.”

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

“How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”

“Nothing can come of nothing.”

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

“What’s done can’t be undone.”

“When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.”

“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.”

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

“The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”

“Thought is free.”

“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

“If we are true to ourselves, we can not be false to anyone.”

“Be great in act, as you have been in thought.”

“Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.”

“All things are ready, if our mind be so.”

“This above all; to thine own self be true.”

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

“’Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.”

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”

“I bear a charmed life.”

“And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.”

“Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”

“The fault…is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

“Love is too young to know what conscience is.”

“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

“Don’t waste your love on somebody, who doesn’t value it.”

“And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.”

“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

“Expectation is the root of all heartache.”

“I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.”

“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.”

“I would not wish any companion in the world but you.”

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

“Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.”

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. Then your love would also change.”

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

“Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love.”

“I am one who loved not wisely but too well.”

“A young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief.”

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
“Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.”

“For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?”

“Speak low, if you speak love.”

“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.”

“Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.”

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

“All that glisters is not gold.”

“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.”

“The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.”

“Such as we are made of, such we be.”

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

“Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”

“Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.”

“A young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief.”

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”

“They do not love that do not show their love.”

“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

“Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”

“In black ink my love may still shine bright.”

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek!”

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Best English Quotes by George Orwell

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.”

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

“Such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”

“Power is not a means; it is an end.”

“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

“Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“On the whole; human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” –

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

“In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.”

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion.”

“It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

“The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”

“It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.”

“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching.”

“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible, to be honest and to remain alive.”

“Such concepts as justice, liberty, and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

“There was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.”

“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

“Will the man in the street ever feel that freedom of the mind is as important and as much in need of being defended as his daily bread?”

“You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

“It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it.”

“Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.”

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“In every one of those little stucco boxes, there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep and dreaming,”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“No one can get up much enthusiasm for a government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth.”

“He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.”

“Faith, hope, money—only a saint could have the first two without having the third.”

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing… Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

“You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”

“Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”

“Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.”

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

“In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it.”

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

“For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favor of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class.”

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’. . . and you’re all right.”

“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.”

“Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.”

“People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

“All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

“Freedom of speech is real.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“In every one of those little stucco boxes, there” s some poor bastard who” s never free except when he” s fast asleep and dreaming”

Re “Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.”

“No one can get up much enthusiasm for a government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government, you can be free inside.”

“People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“In England such concepts as justice, liberty, and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”

“Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.”

“Political language – and with variations, this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. “

“Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a ‘good’ man is squeezing the trigger… have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.”

Famous Writers Quotes by J. K. Rowling

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”

“It is my belief… that the truth is generally preferable to lies.”

“Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

“Don’t let the muggles get you down.”

“I’m going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.”

“It does not dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress adventure.”

“Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.”

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”

“I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

“One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

“Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”

“I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.”

“With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.”

“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”

The thing about growing up with Fred and George is that you sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”

“I would always want printed books.”

“I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”

“When in doubt, go to the library.”

“I don’t read ‘chick lit,’ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.”

“Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.”

“Read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.”

“Wherever I am, if I’ve got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy.”

“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”

“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.”

“Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.”

“The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.”

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”

“Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have.”

“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”

“Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…”

“Percy wouldn’t notice a joke if it danced naked in front of him wearing one of Dobby’s hats.”

“You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts…but you cannot deny he’s got style…”

“Cinderella? Snow White? What’s that? An illness?”

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“To hurt is as human as to breathe.”

“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”

“According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.”

We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

Failure is not fun. It can be awful. But living so cautiously that you never fail is worse.”

“You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”

“If someone asked for my recipe for happiness, step one would be finding out what you love doing most in the world and step two would be finding someone to pay you to do it.”

“It’s important to remember that we all have magic inside of us.”

The discipline involved in finishing a piece of creative work is something on which you can truly pride yourself.”

“Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone’s total control. And the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant the stripping away of the unessential.”

“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies with you.”

“Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign… to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”

“We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same and worth saving.”

“We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.”

“Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.”

“Imagination is the foundation of all invention and innovation.”

“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.”

“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success.” – J.K. Rowling

“Just because it’s taken you three years to notice, Ron, doesn’t mean no one else has spotted I’m a girl!”

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

“Of all the trees we could’ve hit, we had to get one that hits back.”

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!”

“You’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. That’s just part of the learning process. And read a lot. Reading a lot really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.”

“Sometimes, you have to stop trying to force it, walk away and let your subconscious show you the way. Fill up on life for a while.”

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

“Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”

“We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”

“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”

“I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even put a stopper on death.”

“Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.”

“What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.”

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

“Sometimes, you have to stop trying to force it, walk away and let your subconscious show you the way. Fill up on life for a while.”

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends.”

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.”

“And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her. After several long moments, or it might have been half an hour-or possibly several sunlit days- they broke apart.”

“You control your own life. Your own will is extremely powerful.”

“We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

“If you expect to stand under a shower of perpetual praise there is something wrong with you.”

“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies with you.

“Given a time turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV are not your life. Though you will meet many people of my age and older who will confuse the two.”

“We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.”

“Don’t you dare let their laughter extinguish your ambition.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something…. Unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case you failed by default.”

“We’ve all got light and dark inside of us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

“As is a tale, so is life: Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

“The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.”

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.”

Famous Author Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

“We are what we imagine ourselves to be.”

“Enjoy the little things in life because one day you`ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

“Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to conquer the universe.”

“Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”

“All right – I’ll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.”

“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”

“Everything is nothing, with a twist.”

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

“The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”

“How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.”

“There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”

“The nicest veterans…the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

“What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”

“Science is magic that works.”

“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

“If you can do no good, at least do no harm.”

“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

“If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

“She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.”

“Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

“He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”

“The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it”

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.”

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“Maturity…is knowing what your limitations are…Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

“I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”

“Until you die it’s all life.”

“What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.”

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.”

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.”

“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”

“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

“It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: ‘Good-bye.”

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

“What is the purpose of life?…To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!”

“Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.”

“You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.”

“Everything about life is a joke. Don’t you know that?”

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”

“Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?”

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”

“No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.”

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”

“I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.”

“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

“The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.”

“Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”

“And the charming little cottage he’d taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant.”

“But you find out quick enough that old friend are old friends, and nothing more—no wiser, no more help than anyone else.”

“As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.”

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.”

“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

“There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”

“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”

“I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be.”

“That’s what it was to be young—to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.”

“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”

“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

“The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”

“Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!”

“If I should ever die, again God forbid, I hope some of you will say, ‘Kurt’s up in Heaven now.’ That’s my favourite joke.” – Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?

“If somebody says, ‘I love you,’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but what the pistol-holder requires?” – Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

“No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed.”

“I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.”

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

“Actually, I am highly suspicious of love, and any honest biography of me would bear that out.”

Famous Writers Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”

“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

“I Am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.”

“They can because they think they can.”

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

“I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”

“Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”

“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”

“Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”

“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of emancipation itself.”

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written largely in his works.”

“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”

“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“Language is wine upon the lips.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”

“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.”

“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge, are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

“This soul, or life within us, by no means, agree with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like its completeness. I like their anonymity.”

“Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether if I knew what I meant.”

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”

“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”

“It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavor; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.”

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action, yet the action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

“I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”

“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”

“You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.”

“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”

“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”

“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.”

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mold of arm or breast, but they mold our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”

“It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“To enjoy the freedom, we have to control ourselves

“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”

“Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I sight

“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“One like people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”

“Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.”

“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

“To enjoy the freedom, we have to control ourselves.”

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

“It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.”

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FAQ

1. Who are five famous writers?

Ans: The five famous writers are

William Shakespeare
George Orwell
J.K. Rowling
Kurt Vonnegut
Virginia Woolf

2. What are the most famous quotes by Kurt Vonnegut?

Ans: The most famous quotes by Kurt Vonnegut are-

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

3. What are the most famous quotes by William Shakespeare?

Ans: The most famous quotes by William Shakespeare are-

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”

4. What are the most famous quotes by George Orwell?

Ans: The most famous quotes are –

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

5. What is the most famous inspirational quote by J.K. Rowling?

Ans: The most famous inspirational quote by J.K. Rowling is

“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”

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Dev Kirtonia

Hi, I’m Dev Kirtonia, Founder & CEO of Dev Library. A website that provides all SCERT, NCERT 3 to 12, and BA, B.com, B.Sc, and Computer Science with Post Graduate Notes & Suggestions, Novel, eBooks, Biography, Quotes, Study Materials, and more.