Writer Quotes · Page 356

A general cry of "What book? What book? Let us see this famous book!

— Diana Gabaldon

A library is a place full of mouth-watering food for thought.

— Diana Wynne Jones

“The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.”

— Oliver Markus

“My library was where I liked to relax because reading had always been my escape.”

— L.P. Dover

“She kept her nose in a book and her head in the clouds.”

— Karen Robards

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

— Michael Cunningham

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

— Mitch Albom

I get notes posted on my windscreen wipers and through my letterbox.

— Zoe Sugg

“I'd treat myself to a reading marathon all weekend. All the ice cream I could eat, all the pages I could read.…

— Laurie Halse Anderson

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk…

— Douglas Coupland

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in…

— Peter Temple

I like some time on a Sunday to myself, when it's just me, because often I have lines to learn or a…

— Maureen Lipman

“To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical…

— R. David Lankes

“Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch…

— Charlotte Brontë

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

— Paul Auster

I just want to be a part of great stories, whether I'm part of an amazing ensemble cast or I'm leading it…

— Zoe Saldana

“My advice for aspiring writers is simply this: NEVER GIVE UP. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot achieve your…

— Rachel Nicole Wagner

To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the…

— Cynthia Ozick

After my debut didn't go very well with Holt, I needed to be in a healthier head space. I was happy to…

— Paul G. Tremblay

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It…

— Alan Garner

“Writing enables a person to build a protective barrier shielding them from an adverse environment, scrutinize their circumstances, and discover how to…

— Kilroy J. Oldster

“…no biography of his existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as the rest…

— Roberto Bolaño

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising,…

— J. G. Ballard

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong.…

— Tana French

When I hear a story, I think about it from the point of view of the audience.

— Catherine Tresa

As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.

— Jill Abramson

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. John Le Carre

— John Le Carre

I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.

— Svetlana Alexievich

Books allow you to be whoever you want to be, to escape yourself for a while.

— Amy Harmon

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

— Per Petterson

“Reading books will get you to the door, reading people will get you inside the room.”

— Matshona Dhliwayo

Wamiqa means the goddess of wind; my dad is a poet and writer in Punjabi and Gabbi is his pseudonym.

— Wamiqa Gabbi

When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable If I have not an excellent library.

— Jane Austen

Life has many different chapters of story. One bad chapter doesn't mean it's the end of the book.

— Anonymous

When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.

— Sandra Cisneros

I can go off-point, I can go off-word, I can go off-paragraph, but I can never go off message.

— Paul Heyman

“My boyfriend thinks I lost my true calling to become a librarian.”

— Paulina Porizkova

It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.

— W. Somerset Maugham

I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

— Garry Wills

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin