Authorship Quote by Samuel Johnson

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

— Zadie Smith

From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its…

— Robert Aris Willmott

“[T]he narrative intelligences of our books should leave us feeling a bit pressed intellectually, a bit outmatched, amazed ultimately by the talent of the…

— Bryan Basamanowicz

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are…

— Nicholas Murray

“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed…

— Virginia Woolf

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may…

— Norman Mailer

“A writer is a genius not when critics say so, but when her or his book pierces your heart and rips off your blindness…

— Ksenia Anske

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

— Milan Kundera

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

— Bill James

Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel.

— Diane Johnson

The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin