Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the… — Leslie Jamison Copy Share Image
First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how… — Debbie Macomber Copy Share Image
Ben Farmer brings a legend to life in Evangeline, evoking with grace and panache the travails of the Acadians in mid-eighteenth century… — Keith Donohue Copy Share Image
I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting… — Matthew Zapruder Copy Share Image
Show me a novelist – or, indeed, a reader – who wasn’t a socially awkward, self-conscious adolescent, prone to clumsiness and excessive… — Charlotte Mendelson Copy Share Image
Writing is… being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling,… — Mary Gaitskill Copy Share Image
Aesthetics - rather than reason - shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic. 'Thinking in Numbers' is not about an… — Daniel Tammet Copy Share Image
“This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or… — Maxine Hong Kingston Copy Share Image
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit… — Raymond Carver Copy Share Image
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible… — John Ruskin Copy Share Image
I write with the idea that nobody will care about what I've written; I publish with the idea that nobody will care… — Lauren Grodstein Copy Share Image
I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm… — Mary J. Miller Copy Share Image
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
When you are on assignment, you stick to the facts, limit your vision, and often cut out the most revealing material. There… — Leslie Cockburn Copy Share Image
Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
...But I don't think I'm the only person who is tired of books and movies full of paper-doll characters you don't care… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
Chats are so new to newspapers, historically. But they're so incredibly valuable because editors/reporters/columnists get to find out what's on the minds… — Michael Wilbon Copy Share Image
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from… — Johannes Kepler Copy Share Image
RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to… — Ben Marcus Copy Share Image
Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap.… — Martin Gardner Copy Share Image
The brand is lying about something, or at least misrepresenting it. When I read a bottle of shampoo or moisturizer or other… — Aaron Belz Copy Share Image
The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination,… — Bartolome de las Casas Copy Share Image
Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good… — Samuel Johnson Copy Share Image
There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The Hawley Book of the Dead had me completely spellbound from beginning to end. A storytelling virtuosa, Chrysler Szarlan has woven a… — Anne Fortier Copy Share Image
Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave… — Sylvia Plath Copy Share Image
I like big books and I cannot lie. You other readers can’t deny That when a kid walks in with The Name… — Jim C. Hines Copy Share Image
I think a good novel would be where a bunch of men on a ship are looking for a whale. They look… — Jack Handey Copy Share Image
In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of… — Pattiann Rogers Copy Share Image
The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the… — James Ellroy Copy Share Image
When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether… — Thomas B. Macaulay Copy Share Image
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on… — E. M. Forster Copy Share Image
A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think… — Don Winslow Copy Share Image
Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can… — Claudia Rankine Copy Share Image
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I… — Orson Scott Card Copy Share Image
Thrills, chills, spine-tingling mystery, and lots of smiles. It's not easy to combine heart-pounding danger with gut-busting laughs and make it work,… — Wayne Thomas Batson Copy Share Image
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied… — Tom Stoppard Copy Share Image