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

bianglala

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”

Joyce Carol Oates

bianglala

“If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one’s chances of survival increase with each book one reads.”

- Sherman Alexie

bianglala

“You should never read just for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid.”

- John Waters

bianglala

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes — characters even — caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

The Thirteenth Tale : DIANE SETTERFIELD  

bianglala

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.

- Jim Fiebig

WhiskeyScotch

“Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…"

― Philip Pullman

WhiskeyScotch

“Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”

― Samuel Butler

WhiskeyScotch

“Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.”

― Ralph Ellison

WhiskeyScotch

“Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.”

― Léa Seydoux

WhiskeyScotch

“Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.”

― David Rose

WhiskeyScotch

“If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.”

― Lorin Stein

WhiskeyScotch

“Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that.”

― Arti Honrao

WhiskeyScotch

“To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.”

― Ernst Fischer

WhiskeyScotch

“If I may paraphrase Hobbes's well-known aphorism, I would say that 'books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”

― Thomas Henry Huxley

WhiskeyScotch

“Every child deserves to be a boat cast out in a sea of books.”

― K. Lamb

seribulan

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
—Ernest Hemingway

WhiskeyScotch

“A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.”

― K. Lamb

WhiskeyScotch

“Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.”

― Julien Torma

WhiskeyScotch

“Childhood only comes around once. Make your child's memories special. Take them on a new adventure each day. It is as simple as opening a book.”

― K. Lamb

WhiskeyScotch

“Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.”

― Eileen Myles