Writer Quotes · Page 416

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

— Michael Cunningham

“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

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

— Per Petterson

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

— Amy Harmon

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

— Svetlana Alexievich

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

— John Le Carre

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

— Sandra Cisneros

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I…

— Robert E. Howard

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to…

— Bernard Baruch

As you read a book, it's hard to turn into another page unless you understand the first one.. just like LOVE.. it's…

— Kemis Khan

I don't have a boss. Well, I have a boss: the public. If the public doesn't buy my books, I would be…

— Peter Mayle

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

— Jane Goldman

A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an…

— Mary Oliver

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write…

— Anais Nin

I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with,…

— Judy Blume

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned…

— Helene Cixous

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while…

— Andrew O'Hagan

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his…

— Ernest Hemingway

The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with…

— Amos Bronson Alcott

M. J. Putney has created true magic with this book, the kind that comes when you curl up in a comfortable armchair…

— Catherine Asaro

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole…

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

“So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone…

— Italo Calvino

“The writer becomes a superhero every time he or she sits down to write. We must excel ourselves with each new writing…

— Rob Parnell

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

— Anonymous

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

— Jane Austen

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— Paulina Porizkova

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

— Paul Heyman

I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.

— Bristol Palin

“When you read and write good books a divine force will turn you good”

— Smart Oyejide

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Garry Wills

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

— Maya Angelou

“You and your books. Ah, what a gift it must be to discover the world in those squiggly lines.”

— Linda Lafferty

A lot of people talk about writing. The secret is to write, not talk.

— Jackie Collins

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.”

— John Aiken

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

— Janet Flanner

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.

— Stephen King