Writer Quotes · Page 500

“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

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

— Mason Cooley

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

— YKRaikou

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

— Henry Miller

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

— Anonymous

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

— Voltaire

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book;…

— Paula Danziger

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the…

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

— Patrick Rothfuss

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be… But that's the fun of writing a novel…

— Haruki Murakami

I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the…

— Emma Donoghue

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel…

— George Pelecanos

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we…

— J. G. Holland

I just think structure can make a book feel so much bigger. It's the architecture. You could use flimsy materials if you…

— Jami Attenberg

Every now and then, a writer emerges who just gets better and better. These are the really exciting ones to encounter. Their…

— Amanda Foreman

“My real friends were books and adults. Books didn’t care that I could hold an interesting conversation with adults. They also didn’t…

— Mirna Valerio

If I were a first rate writer, I wouldn't mind a bit. What does depress me is this: it is so desperately…

— Martha Gellhorn

It is so very easy and so very pleasant, too, to read only books which lead to nothing, light and interesting books,…

— Anonymous

“By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as “previously owned”; but…

— Julian Barnes

“For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had '…

— George Orwell

It's fun to figure out a way to make something happen that will get the reader involved on a visceral level. When…

— Nick Petrie

“As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are…

— William Faulkner

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

— Philip Roth

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Rod Serling

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— William Fritz

“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

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

— Norman Mailer

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

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Tucker Max

Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

— C. S. Lewis

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

— Leslie Uggams

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

— Hilary Mantel

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

— Bertrand Russell

My novel, 'Kingdom of Scars', is a coming-of-age story.

— Eoin Macken

Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.

— James Franco