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

Zasss777

We were together. I forget the rest. - Walt Whitman

seribulan

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.” — Charles William Eliot

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

WhiskeyScotch

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

― Joe Haldeman

WhiskeyScotch

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.”

― Roger Zelazny

WhiskeyScotch

“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”

― Leo Rosten

WhiskeyScotch

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

― May Sarton

WhiskeyScotch

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”

― Edna Ferber

WhiskeyScotch

“When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.”

― Robin McKinley

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”

― Sholem Asch

WhiskeyScotch

“Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.”

― Red Haircrow

WhiskeyScotch

“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.”

― Gustave Flaubert

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.”

― Gregory McDonald

cornfla1

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“A question I've thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

seribulan

“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” - Anthony Trollope

seribulan

“The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense.” - J.A. Langford

WhiskeyScotch

“I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.”   

― David Farland

WhiskeyScotch

“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.”

― Raymond Chandler

WhiskeyScotch

“A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.”

― Lauren Hammond

WhiskeyScotch

“Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.”

― Amy Joy