Writer Quotes · Page 536

I love to lose myself in other men's minds… Books think for me.

— Charles Lamb

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

— David Foster Wallace

“morigu the desacration and morigu the dead great books but series is unfinished”

— Mark C. Perry

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

— Mary Karr

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

— Anonymous

“Trying to write on a deadline is like trying to have an orgasm with a gun to your head.”

— Kim Gruenenfelder

Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.

— Joe Queenan

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

— Neil Diamond

“...and always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on...”

— Basil Bunting

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you…

— Chang-Rae Lee

“I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork.…

— Virginia Euwer Wolff

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers

— Jacques Barzun

“...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about…

— Katie Wood Ray

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big…

— Michael Chabon

“The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.”

— David Mitchell

“Having a nice library doesn’t make you smart. Don’t buy books and stack them up in your library; read them.”

— Mensah Oteh

Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter…

— Felix Mendelssohn

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their…

— Julia Glass

One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a…

— Allison Pearson

“My hope is that you read these pages and know you aren’t alone when you submit your short work. You are part…

— Windy Lynn Harris

“The first essential in any book is that it have something significant to say --a book that leaves the reader with bigger…

— Rebecca Caudill

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the…

— Doris Lessing

“He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must…

— John Gardner

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it…

— Miriam Toews

If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can't, then you must be a writer.

— Fannie Flagg

“Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.”

— Eleanor Crumblehulme library assistant University of British Columbia

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

— John Steinbeck

“Reading is getting lost in a world of your choosing without having to feel the physical pain ~ Me.”

— Musicinto

The main thing I do now is I coach kids, and all of these stories along the way are based in reality.

— Craig Johnston

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm writing for those people in Kenya, but in Irvine and in New York.

— Ngugi wa Thiong'o

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

— Barry Hannah

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

— Nadine Gordimer

I have my own publishing company called 'I Am McLovin Publishing.

— Anonymous

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

— Vladimir Nabokov

I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings.

— Sefi Atta

In the greatest chapter in your book, are there pages where it hurts to look?

— Blondie

“Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.”

— James Jones

If you have that unconquerable urge to write, nothing will stop you from writing.

— Theodore Dreiser

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

— Edward Abbey