The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Authors do this for a living, and if you take their work for nothing, you are depriving them of a living.
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Most of the authors I liked were dead, so it didn't seem like a safe occupation.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
No opposing quotes found.