Writer Quotes · Page 368

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.

— Henry Miller

“Writing is like running away. Running away to a place you made with your own hand.”

— YKRaikou

Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence.

— Mason Cooley

“The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.”

— Hal Duncan

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

— Dan Savage

“A good library contains something in it to offend everyone.”

— Jo Goodwin

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.

— Virginia Woolf

Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.

— Ruth Ozeki

“But why this obsession with what's actually true, the real, all that? Can't you accept that our lives are always part fiction?”

— Bhaskar Ghose

“Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of…

— Rebecca Makkai

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much…

— Nicholas Mosley

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

— Elizabeth Bowen

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that…

— Isabel Allende

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of…

— Graham Swift

writers who go outside the lines when they draw pictures of the world are seldom rewarded for their efforts.

— Jennifer Stone

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its…

— Augustus Hare

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is…

— Graham Swift

“When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and…

— Keith Richards

In my class - in all fifth-grade classes - we were required to read 'classics,' books like 'Shiloh,' which is about a…

— Marley Dias

I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced.…

— Ayelet Waldman

Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of…

— Thomas Carlyle

“was this one time I looked out the window and saw that John McClaren was up in the tree house alone. He…

— Jenny Han

Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs…

— Tim Harford

I read a lot of books. I read because it inspires me and shows me paths that I could never imagine. Sometimes…

— Harper Reed

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

— Umberto Eco

I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.

— Rod Serling

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

— Annie Proulx

“There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.”

— Philip Roth

One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work.

— Voltaire

I've loved reading since I was a kid. Sometimes I have two or three books going at the same time.

— Leslie Uggams

The Big Five publishing companies are dinosaurs trying to survive in a post-meteor world. They won't.

— Tucker Max

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

— Laurence Sterne

Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

— C. S. Lewis

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

— Norman Mailer

“I am more of a doer than a writer. I do not live to write. I write because I have lived.”

— Thurman P. Banks Jr

“If you have a book, and an imagination, you can never find yourself alone. Ever.”

— William Fritz

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

— Barbara Kingsolver

[Truman Capote] was not only just selling his writing, but he was selling himself as a person.

— Philip Seymour Hoffman

“...books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval...”

— Will Schwalbe

Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n. One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.

— Douglas Adams