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

WhiskeyScotch

“The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.”

― Robert Galbraith

WhiskeyScotch

“Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.”

― Charles Finch

WhiskeyScotch

“I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature.”

― Wency June Libot

WhiskeyScotch

“Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.”

― Peg Kehert

WhiskeyScotch

“Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …”

― Ben Marcus

WhiskeyScotch

“I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every book is the I Ching. You pick it up, open it, and there it is, there you are.”

― Andrés Neuman

WhiskeyScotch

“If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”

― Cynthia Ozick

WhiskeyScotch

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.”

― Oscar Wilde

WhiskeyScotch

“A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.”

― Italo Calvino

WhiskeyScotch

“...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.”

― Toby Litt

seribulan

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth

seribulan

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King

seribulan

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

WhiskeyScotch

“Yet when books have been read and reread, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.”

― Walter Farley

WhiskeyScotch

“But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”

― Tim Parks

WhiskeyScotch

“It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.”

― Mary Ruefle

WhiskeyScotch

“Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.”

― Nikita Dudani

WhiskeyScotch

“Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.”

― E.A. Bucchianeri

WhiskeyScotch

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

― Ezra Pound

WhiskeyScotch

“I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.”

― Richard Flanagan