Writer Quotes · Page 447

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -

— Stephen King

“All I can do is read a book to stay awake, and it rips my life away, but it's a great escape.”

— Blind Melon

When it comes to books and friends, it is best to have only a few but all good ones.

— Guillaume Musso

“Books should grow the soul - while the reader has a little fun along the way.”

— A.K. Frailey

The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people’s lives.

— Guy Kawasaki

“Only two classes of books have universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.”

— Ford Maddox

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.

— Benedict Cumberbatch

“Writing is not about the voices in your head, but the voices that make the great leap to the page.”

— J.H. Glaze

Once I'm writing, I'm very disciplined. There's a certain magic. It's like you're living at a deeper current. It's a very complete…

— Laura Nyro

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is…

— Melvil Dewey

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

— Jamaica Kincaid

“It was apparent...that, all over America, thousands of people threw down a book or got up from a television show and said,…

— Donald E. Westlake

I'm horrible at concepts. My life is random and my inspiration is random. But it's all written in a very specific time…

— Oh Land

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be…

— Kazuo Ishiguro

I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I…

— Ida B. Wells

“Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise…

— Poggio Bracciolini Stephen Greenblatt

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made…

— Sarah Weinman

“Children need to see themselves in books. They need to see their gender. They need to see their color, hair texture, their…

— Christian Robinson

“Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think…

— David Foster Wallace

Delicious... Everything I'd hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise,…

— Austin Grossman

The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize…

— Chuck Palahniuk

Amaryllis in Blueberry is a rich, evocative story about an unusual family that will sweep readers away to another place and time.…

— Susan Wiggs

I was working on the book, but in a very subterranean kind of a fashion. And I think that giving yourself permission…

— Emily Barton

Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their…

— Hilary Mantel

A great deal of living must go to a very little writing.

— Frances Ridley Havergal

“I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.”

— Elizabeth Reyes

“I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.”

— Jo Walton

“Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library:”

— Anonymous

I'm trying to write for people my age. And my inspiration over the years has changed dramatically.

— John Mellencamp

“Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“Reading inspires us to reach further, imagine more, and search for our passports.”

— Peggy Kopman-Owens

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.

— Mason Cooley

I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.

— Winona Ryder

A man who attempts to read all the new productions must do as the flea does,--skip.

— Samuel Rogers

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

— Chris Pavone

When I went to Bosnia, I was there to tell someone else's story and I was more methodical.

— Joe Sacco

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

— Robert Frost

I never want to feel constrained by writing a novel for a specific audience.

— Christina Baker Kline

It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing.

— Neil Jordan

I love writers who are insightful enough to be cynical but choose not to be.

— Brian D. McLaren