You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“reading has as many functions as the human body, and... not all of them are cerebral.” — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.” — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“A book--the book that was, for some reason, THE book--can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.” — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
What usually happens is that when I'm nearing the end of one novel a vague idea about what I want to do… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.” — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
