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

bianglala

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colours of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer – perhaps more.

JASPER FFORDE

seribulan

Stephen King. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. “

bianglala

For me, writing in prison was a way of going into a space, which was partly memory and obviously partly one of the other rooms, a room of imagination.

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

bianglala

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.

ANNE ENRIGHT

bianglala

Know that you are a writer and your obligation, possibly your calling, is to write. Writing is your fallback position. As much as you can, avoid judging your work. When you find yourself doing it, shift your thoughts elsewhere.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

bianglala

There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read only once can’t.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

bianglala

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don’t care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author’s cruelty. And the reader’s sympathy … it takes a mean author to write a good story.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

bianglala

Establish writing habits, whatever they are, a particular time to write, a number of pages that have to be written, a time goal.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

bianglala

Be honest with yourself in terms of what you’re writing. Is what you’re writing really what you want to write, or what you think a publisher wants to read, because that was the mistake I was making for a long time.

CHRISTOPHER BOOKMYRE

bianglala

Some of the best literature of the last hundred years has come out of the genre tradition and of course the best of it challenges expectations, just as the best of literary fiction challenges those expectations.

CHINA MIEVILLE

bianglala

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

GUY KAWASAKI

bianglala

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you’re comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

ANNE FADIMAN

seribulan

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. Ray Bradbury

KILL_NANCY

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” -Patrick Rothfuss

KILL_NANCY

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges

KILL_NANCY

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” - Anne Quinlan

KILL_NANCY

"So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone." Roald Dahl

KILL_NANCY

The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.

From Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett.

KILL_NANCY

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

KILL_NANCY

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.