Writer Quotes · Page 341

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

— Alistair Cooke

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

— Simone de Beauvoir

“Writing is like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”

— Phillip Roth

Books and technology are braided together and always have been.

— Robin Sloan

I often write about the moon, and more often than not, it is to symbolise a person, or a quality.

— Gulzar

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

— Lloyd Alexander

“i love reading and am always stuck in one labrinth of letters or other”

— Sarah Vowell

“I decide a book is bad if I get angrier and angrier as I read it.”

— Daniel T. O'Hara

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

— Paul Kingsnorth

“I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge.”

— Chloe Neill

I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

— Kaye Gibbons

“I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books…

— Edward Abbey

I write in the morning, I walk in the afternoon and I read in the evening. It's a very easy, lovely life.

— Margaret Forster

I started writing, then said I don't know if I want to share all that. I don't know if I want to…

— Jason Taylor

I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to…

— Glenn Frey

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut - he's my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was…

— Steven Wright

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just…

— David Eddings

The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of…

— Justin Cartwright

“It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss - a first kiss especially - is the moment before your…

— Laini Taylor

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that…

— Amy Tan

“In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in…

— Kurt Vonnegut

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I think all those years that I spent as a nurse, from the age of seventeen, just allowed me an insight into…

— Christie Watson

I'm always amazed by those people who get up at 5 and write till 8 and then eat a peach and walk…

— Richard Greenberg

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

— Nikki Giovanni

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

— Kurt Vonnegut

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow…

— Lynda Barry

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

— Jerry Seinfeld

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

— David Mitchell

Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel.

— Thomas Steinbeck

No writer should minimize the factor that affects everyone, but is beyond control: luck.

— John Jakes

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

— Neal Stephenson

“The first way Maya approaches a book is to smell it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

Learn from your rejections and polish your craft. Write for the sheer joy of being creative.

— Jonathan Weeks

Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them.

— Edwin Arlington Robinson

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

— Emma Thompson

The doors of the world are opened to people who can read.

— Anonymous

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

— Samuel Johnson

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

— Diana Gabaldon

We want to raise a generation of kids who have a mouse in one hand and a book in the other,

— Henry Jenkins