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

QueenIsolde

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Roberto Bolao, 2666

QueenIsolde

Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.
Christian Bauman

QueenIsolde

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

QueenIsolde

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Carl Sagan

QueenIsolde

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

QueenIsolde

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
–Haruki Murakami

QueenIsolde

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” — Confucius

seribulan

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal

seribulan

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell

WhiskeyScotch

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

― Henry David Thoreau

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

― Charles Bukowski

WhiskeyScotch

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”

― Randall Jarrell

WhiskeyScotch

“Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.”

― Carolyn See

WhiskeyScotch

“Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”

― Ernest Hemingway

WhiskeyScotch

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”

― H.G. Wells

WhiskeyScotch

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

― Mark Twain

WhiskeyScotch

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”

― Edgar Allan Poe

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”

― Jules Renard

WhiskeyScotch

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”

― Leo Tolstoy

seribulan

“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD