Writer Quotes · Page 347

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

— Jim Crace

“Just write what You want to write, how You want to write it! K.D.Faerydae”

— K.D. Faerydae

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

— Stephen King

“If investors only had to study the past, the richest people would be librarians.”

— Daniel Pecaut

Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.

— Marilyn Johnson

“Write for love, edit for perfection & publish to share that moment in time”

— Debbie Behan

“Tension is making the reader ask a question, and then not answering it.”

— Rachel Aaron

Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people,…

— Ann Patchett

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

— Stephen King

Kat Stratford: Romantic? Hemingway? He was an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail…

— 10 Things I Hate About You

When I was very small, I loved 'Meg And Mog' by Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski. I had all the books and…

— Emma Healey

Night Owls is a fast, fun read that kept me turning the pages. Lauren M. Roy delivers a plot that zips, dialogue…

— Devon Monk

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.'

— Kate Atkinson

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so…

— Hilary Mantel

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and…

— Stephen Vincent Benet

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of…

— Anne Fadiman

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over…

— Rachel Joyce

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way -…

— Norman Mailer

“I get inspired to write by watching the news. I listen to conversations I shouldn't listen to. I pay attention to my…

— H.L. Sudler

“I gave Henry a supscription [sic] to the Book of the Month club that tells you the book you have to read…

— Anita Loos

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction,…

— David Edelstein

“The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms,” he wrote, “so that one can be alone if…

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't…

— Julia Cameron

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

— Paulo Coelho

There comes a time when you have to chose between turning the page and closing the book…

— Melchor Lim

“If you don't love to read, you just haven't found the right book.”

— Tim Green

Books make great gifts because you don't have to plug them in.

— Alec Baldwin

Of all needs a book has, the chief need is to be readable.

— Anthony Trollope

I've loved writing since I was little. I used to write stories.

— Chrissy Costanza

“Killed by a librarian with a red card," said Jerry. "that's got to be embarrassing.”

— John Joseph Adams

I've always written about stuff I have gone through.

— Adam Gontier

I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.

— Lee Child

“Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors.”

— Peggy A. Borel

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

— Tama Janowitz

This paper of yours is so lightly written that you must have sweated terribly.

— Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

“Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.”

— Paul Acampora

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.

— James C. Collins

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I was fortunate to attend a school with an excellent library”

— Syrie James