Connecting Readers and Writers
A page devoted to author quotes and literary quotes. Quotes about writing, about life, about money and about writers' own work: we round up the most memorable lines and tell the story behind each one, who said it, when, and why it still matters.
Over the years our quote gallery has featured writers from Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and James Baldwin to Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Maya Angelou and Hunter S. Thompson. Lately we have been collecting writers on luck, risk and money, a theme that runs through our Casino Novels section. If there is a particular author or quote you would like to see here, let us know.
Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His great project, La Comédie humaine, is a sequence of nearly a hundred novels, stories and studies presenting a panorama of French society in the years after the fall of Napoleon.
Poet, short story writer, critic and founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) is remembered as one of the funniest and most cutting observers of human nature.
Few writers are as quotable as Hunter S. Thompson, and few of his lines are as widely borrowed as this one. Five words that sum up his whole philosophy: if you choose an adventure, you accept everything that comes with it.
Continue reading Hunter S. Thompson Quote: Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride
Mark Twain opened each chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson with a maxim from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar." This one, at the head of chapter 13, is among his most quoted lines, and it is funnier still when you know how much money Twain lost.