We like to read others but we do not like to be read. — Francois de La Rochefoucauld Copy Share Image
Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct. — Samuel Johnson Copy Share Image
At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world. — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
As writers, we all have an agenda, but if you recognize that agenda in a book, then you've failed. — Janet Evanovich Copy Share Image
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was… — Simon Callow Copy Share Image
“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little… — Matt Haig Copy Share Image
“Why, the club was just the quietest place in the world, a place where a woman could run in to brush her… — Kathleen Thompson Norris Copy Share Image
“I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the… — Reif Larsen Copy Share Image
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter,… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
I still like paper books. Like, book is a flammable object. After you read it, you could use it to get warm.… — Demetri Martin Copy Share Image
The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing… — Steve Erickson Copy Share Image
“How dearly, indeed, I loved my pit, my dusky room, the area of my desk with its piles of books! How I… — Yukio Mishima Copy Share Image
For short term relaxation, I take a hot tub. It's my best way to unblock writers' block, too. For a bit longer… — Ellen Hopkins Copy Share Image
Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is,… — Julia Glass Copy Share Image
“focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting… — Fay Weldon Copy Share Image
“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical… — John Irving Copy Share Image
From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw… — Hoda Kotb Copy Share Image
I want to write a story for people where they finish it, and it sticks with them. — Sylvia Day Copy Share Image
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is true, that it is not at all necessary to love many books, in order to love them much. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Copy Share Image
“There is no such thing as an 'unemployed writer', only an unemployed mind” — Kevin Cowdall Copy Share Image
I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way. — Nick Hornby Copy Share Image
You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you. — Stephen King Copy Share Image
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly. — Anonymous Copy Share Image
The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality". — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Choose a book," she said. "Any book. Bring it here, and I'll show you what else the world can offer.” — Peter V. Brett Copy Share Image
“I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.” — Sara Sheridan Copy Share Image
I consider a house without books or a piano to be unfurnished. — Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt Copy Share Image
One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever. — Sylvia Townsend Warner Copy Share Image
“It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries in life.” — Henry Ward Beecher Copy Share Image
