...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

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“Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.”

― Brian Keene

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“Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”

― John Steinbeck

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“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

― Joyce Carol Oates

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“Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.”

― Jennifer Murgia

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“Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.”

― Gabrielle Tozer

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“Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ”

― Tara Bray Smith

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“The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.”

― Stephen Sondheim

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“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

― Archibald MacLeish

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“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”

― Connie Willis

seribulan

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” - Ernest Hemingway

seribulan

“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.” - John Adams

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“Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.”

― Jonathan Safran Foer

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“If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.”

― R.A. Salvatore

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“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.”

― Susan Sontag

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“To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. ”

― Jennifer Salaiz

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“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”

― E.L. Doctorow

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“The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.”

― Anne Lamott

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“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.”

― Nadine Gordimer

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“Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.”

― Drew Goodman

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“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.”

― Russell Baker