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Writer Quotes by Anna Quindlen

45 Writer quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Writer quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

Reading has always been my home, a sustenance that feels like an invincible companion. Quindlen notes that books change as we change, making each reread a new experience, and that happy stories are actually the hardest to write. She also reminds us that writing badly can become better, while not writing at all yields nothing.

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Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

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I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

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“I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.”

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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

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You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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“There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.”

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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

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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…

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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people…

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“All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they…

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“It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are…

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I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any…

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My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the…

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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…

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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

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The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think…

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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and…

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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off…

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At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year…

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“Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I…

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“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of…

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If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life…

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I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when…

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“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year…

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What usually happens is that when I'm nearing the end of one novel a vague idea about what I want to do…

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“Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The…

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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

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“reading has as many functions as the human body, and... not all of them are cerebral.”

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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are…

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I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been…

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the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of…

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“A book--the book that was, for some reason, THE book--can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the…

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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their…

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those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about…

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“The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and…

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Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of…

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“I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.”

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Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours…

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More by Anna Quindlen

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,…

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…

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose…

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

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…

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at…

“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…

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

“In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once,…

“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I…

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to…