Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals…

— Martin Filler

“That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

Housewives' is real, yes. We say what we're thinking at the time. But filming our real lives is a huge production that takes a…

— Teresa Giudice

For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn't expect to. Then you have to go back to…

— Sofia Coppola

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we…

— John Guare

“The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.”

— Anne Sexton

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.

— J.M.G. Le Clézio

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony…

— Roger Ebert

“Dismemberment, even posthumous, is obscene.”

— Brian Kimberling

“If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn’t apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season’s trends and resigning yourself to being…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

You should die now if you was born so far within posthumous name

— Tivea

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which…

— Anna Brownell Jameson

“He pinched the remaining chapters’ pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.”

— David S.E. Zapanta