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

LelaRentaka7

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

LelaRentaka7

“In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.”
― George Saunders

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world. ”
― Haruki Murakami

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy ”
― Jack Kerouac

LelaRentaka7

“Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.”
― Margaret Atwood

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”
― Dean Wesley Smith

seribulan

LelaRentaka7

“The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them.”
― Tahereh Mafi

LelaRentaka7

“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. ”
― Zadie Smith

LelaRentaka7

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”
― E.L. Doctorow

LelaRentaka7

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."
― John Osborne

LelaRentaka7

“The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”
― Norman Mailer

LelaRentaka7

“Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there.”
― Jef Mallett

LelaRentaka7

“I wasn't born to cook or clean,
but to read and write,
if you don't like me the way I am,
then go fly a kite.”
― Besa Kosova

LelaRentaka7

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