Books Quotes - Page 74

If you can't write a book, write a chapter. If you can't do that, write a page, a sentence or a word. For it is from a single word that books are made.

Tarun Betala

Reading is air in my lungs, fire in my blood, company in my thoughts.

Mala Naidoo

If any accolades come in the writing of this story, all praise will be His, all Glory will rightly go to Him. If He will allow me to share some part in this, I am truly humbled.

Lynn Dove

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.

Annie Dillard

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

George Eliot

There can be no forced inspiration.

Dejan Stojanovic

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time.

Elizabeth Berg

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Alan Bennett

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

Steven Johnson

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

Alan Bennett

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past ("en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés"). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

Umberto Eco

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Jeanette Winterson

Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.

Roberta Gellis

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Neil Gaiman

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Neil Gaiman

Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.

Jo Linsdell

...ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.

Shandy L. Kurth

Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.

Christopher Stocking

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

Oriana Fallaci

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

Stephen Fry

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.

E.A. Bucchianeri

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

Joe Queenan

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Dejan Stojanovic

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

Jonathan Harnisch

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

Eudora Welty

The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!-

Bangambiki Habyarimana

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.

Frances Mayes

Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.

Amanda Craig

No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.

Kyoko Yoshida

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives.

Richard Ford

... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

Elizabeth Sims

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Don DeLillo

Be thankful for the people who have stood by you and cheered you on, but don't forget to be thankful for the ones that said it could not be done. Writing a book is no small task and even the skeptics can help you get where you want to be!

C.K. Webb

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

Truman Capote

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Paul Auster

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!

C. JoyBell C.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

John Bunyan

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Aberjhani

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

Jeanette Winterson

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

Theodora Goss

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

Theodora Goss

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.

Dejan Stojanovic

When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.

P.S. Bartlett

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

Niall Williams

The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

Henry David Thoreau

Life's adventures make great reading!

Denise Robbins

Many people can and have written books, but many have nothing to say.

Amy Rogers

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

Stephen Potter

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

Steven Millhauser

On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.

Simon Cheshire

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Annie Dillard

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

Theodora Goss

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Theodora Goss

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

Jeanette Winterson

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

Mike Bryan

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Alain de Botton

I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.

Nadège Richards

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Books Quotes - Page 74

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