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

LelaRentaka7

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”
― Neil Gaiman

LelaRentaka7

“When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.”
― Stephen King

LelaRentaka7

“Don't you know no one can escape
the power of creatures reaching out
with breath alone?”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

LelaRentaka7

“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.”
― Patricia Fuller

LelaRentaka7

“You can cover a great deal of country in books. ”
― Andrew Lang

LelaRentaka7

“I write to understand as much as to be understood.”
― Elie Wiesel

LelaRentaka7

“A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.”
― Baltasar Gracián

LelaRentaka7

“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity.”
― Jonathan Franzen

LelaRentaka7

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

LelaRentaka7

“I get angry about things, then go on and work.”
― Toni Morrison

LelaRentaka7

“I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”
― Gustave Flaubert

LelaRentaka7

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

LelaRentaka7

“No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."
― David McCullough

LelaRentaka7

“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.”
― James J. Kilpatrick

LelaRentaka7

“When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.”
― Preston Sturges

LelaRentaka7

“Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.
My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

LelaRentaka7

“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

LelaRentaka7

Dæmons, for example, might otherwise be only a meaningless decoration, adding nothing to the story: but I use them to embody and picture some truths about human personality which I couldn't picture so easily without them. I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvelous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen?”
― Philip Pullman