Writer Quotes · Page 493

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

— Mark Twain

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

— Jeanette Winterson

Reading and exercising are two things in life that are not necessary.

— Thundercat

“Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”

— Neil Gaiman

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

— Walter Bagehot

Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]

— Ernst Junger

A man makes his reputation not by what he writes, but by what others write about him.

— Vikrant Parsai

You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing's vile hard reading.

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“I never have any clue what my next book is going to be about, when the time comes, the book starts pouring…

— Abhijit Naskar

Once you write a book, you hand it over to the readers, and it's their book then. They're so involved. They ask…

— Fiona Barton

“Writers are a strange breed. After all, we hear voices in our heads all the time, and sometimes, we even talk to…

— Stevie J. Cole

With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until…

— Beverly Cleary

I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or…

— Diana Gabaldon

I have a couple of thousand books in my personal library. Choosing a favorite is next to impossible. But I do love…

— Tim Gunn

In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer…

— Terence Winter

“I promise you a case of writing paralysis if you think about too many of these tools when you sit down to…

— Roy Peter Clark

I actually had publishers that would encourage me at times to keep it simpler, not pack in so much information, but I'm…

— Walker Hayes

“Closing the book, Winnie scowled and said, “Why do you have to be so… so…” she trailed off, unable to think of…

— Tim O'Rourke

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to…

— E. B. White

I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a…

— Ayana Mathis

“She’d never spent entire days lying on her bed reading, entire nights making up complicated stories in her head. She’d not dreamed…

— Joanna Rakoff

“I do not, can not write just for money. Lord knows I haven't made much. I write because it is what my…

— Stanley Christopher

I am not attempting to preserve culture, or record actual events or stories. Instead I bow my head in gratitude to those…

— Patricia Briggs

Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all…

— Mary Lee Settle

“Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.”

— Horace Mann

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

— Edna O'Brien

“Gone was the meek little librarian. Gavin made me wanton and reckless”

— Kendall Ryan

“A writer's mind is a place where demons kill angels in disguise.”

— Ram Vignesh

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

— Voltaire

“Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”

— Virginia Woolf

The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.

— Andre Aciman

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

— Tobias Smollett

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

— Joe Haldeman

I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before.

— Colson Whitehead

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

— Ernest Hemingway

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

— Neil Gaiman

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“How can you be nervous? Don't you see? We're in a library.”

— Eilis O'Neal

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand,

— Herta Muller

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.

— Quentin S. Crisp