50 Famous Author Quotes About The Power Of Expression
Published March 3, 2023
Are you looking for awesome famous author quotes?
If so, look no further because we have some of the most inspiring and powerful selections of quotes from famous authors.
This article focuses on world-renowned writers’ impact on our society.
Who is the most famous author ever?
There is no metric for authentically measuring who is the most famous author ever.
That GOAT or Greatest Of All Time debate is a common discussion in pretty much anything.
Do we measure greatness by the impact a writer has?
Do we measure it on the number of copies sold?
Many factors influence who readers recognize as the greatest writer of all time.
When many people think of literary giants, names like William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Maya Angelou, and Danielle Steel come to mind.
Those four authors alone have sold an estimated ten billion copies!
Check out these astonishing famous author facts below:
- JD Salinger drank his own urine and entered a trance-like state.
- Mark Twain nearly drowned nine times before learning how to swim.
- Charles Dickens suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Who is the greatest American author?
It takes a bright author to create a colorful novel.
Herman Melville is known for his classic novel Moby Dick.
Melville, like many other authors, was an eccentric man.
He once said, “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
Many of the world’s most beloved authors have lived mighty lives.
Charles Dickens wrote classics such as Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.
Dickens had extreme OCD, which caused him to brush his hair twenty times a day.
He also rearranged the furniture in the hotel rooms he slept in.
Dickens was known to have a pet raven he adored.
He loved the bird so much that he had it stuffed and mounted in his office when it died.
In elementary school, many children have famously told their teacher that the dog ate their homework.
Well, author John Steinbeck literally had this occur.
His dog ate his first manuscript for his classic novel, Of Mice and Men.
Who is the most significant female author?
Agatha Christie is an author who led an interesting life.
She ate apples in the bath for creative inspiration.
She also attempted to take up smoking for aesthetic purposes and was upset she could not develop the habit.
Christie once went missing for eleven days.
Many speculate she had a supernatural experience.
People close to her have suggested extraterrestrials abducted her; others suggest she had an out-of-body amnesic experience due to stress.
Maya Angelou is one of the greatest writers of our time.
Angelou is a rape survivor; she lived in brothels, sold drugs, and lived a life of crime as a youth.
Despite a tumultuous youth, the poet laureate rose to become one of our nation’s most gifted and accomplished writers.
To learn more about the world’s most influential authors, check out our famous author quotes below for more great content.
You will also enjoy our article on Louis L’Amour quotes.
Short inspirational famous author quotes about life
This selection of famous author quotes is inspiring and enlightening.
1. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” — Haruki Murakami
2. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf
3. “Tears are words that need to be written.” — Paulo Coelho
4. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
5. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
6. “The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice” — George Eliot
7. “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” — Emily Dickinson
8. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
9. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” — Oscar Wilde
10. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
Meaningful famous author quotes
This list includes a powerhouse collection of well-known authors.
11. “Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality.” — Emily Dickinson
12. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath
13. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” — Plato
14. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
15. “As a writer, you should not judge; you should understand.” — Ernest Hemingway
16. “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.” — C.S. Lewis
17. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” — William Shakespeare
18. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” — Maya Angelou
19. “I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain.” — Sylvia Plath
20. “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Famous author quotes about following your passion
Life happens to all of us. However, it is not about how many times we fall but how many times we get up.
21. “Life is tough, my darling, but so are you.” — Stephanie Bennett Henry
22. “We are all broken; that’s how the light gets in.” — Ernest Hemingway
23. “Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.” — Brene Brown
24. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King
25. “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” — Mark Twain
26. “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” — Voltaire
27. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut
28. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” — Anne Frank
29. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
30. “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka
Famous author quotes on the power of writing and expression
Writers have kept humanity questioning the norm and pushing the boundaries. This collection honors that tradition.
31. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville
32. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen
33. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus
34. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines
35. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
36. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
37. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner
38. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco
39. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck
40. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard
Famous author quotes about trusting your heart
The answers we seek can be found by listening to our hearts. This selection of famous author quotes reminds us to look inside for the answers in life.
41. “Trust our heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.” — E. E. Cummings
42. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” — Mark Twain
43. “Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
44. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
45. “Sometimes, you read a book, and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” — John Green
46. “Maybe it’s not about having a beautiful day, but about finding beautiful moments. Maybe a whole day is just too much to ask. I could choose to believe that in every day, in all things, no matter how dark and ugly, there are shards of beauty if I look for them.” — Anna White
47. “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually, you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” — Octavia E. Butler
48. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter, or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff
49. “Read, read, read. Read everything; trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner
50. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” — Neil Gaiman
Famous authors make the world go round
Authors have a special place in human history.
We have been telling stories from our earliest days of carving images on cave walls.
J.R.R. Tolkien is one the most successful authors of our modern era.
His Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series have been made into blockbuster films.
Tolkien is an eccentric figure as well.
He has been known to attend parties dressed as a polar bear, and he would often chase his neighbor down the street dressed as an Anglo-Saxon warrior.
Some shopkeepers reported that on several occasions, Tolkien offered his false teeth as payment when he had no money.
Edgar Allan Poe is known for his macabre writing style.
His work explores the dark side of the human condition.
Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was twenty-six years old.
When he wrote, he kept a Siamese cat on his shoulder.
Poe was a bit of a hermit; he rarely left the house, but when he did, he would bring several pistols and his Great Dane.
Who is your favorite famous author?
Please, be sure to tell us in the comment section below.
Get more powerful quotes from a famous author not listed above with these Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes.
