Admiration Quote by Mark Twain

The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time…

— Patricia Highsmith

Any writer knows he has to pay for his compliments. As soon as he has said, Why, thank you, that's very generous of you,…

— Mary Jane Ward

A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that…

— Horace

[A writer] must try to think clearly, to feel deeply, to write honestly. If he is fortunate he will make a living, but his…

— Lawrence Clark Powell

I want to offer a word of encouragement to authors: You have to feel called to the message of your book enough that you…

— Jud Wilhite

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

— Samuel Johnson

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.

— Sarah Fielding

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do…

— Norman Cousins

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments.

— Annie Barrows

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

— Willa Cather