...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

bianglala

“Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.”

CLAIRE FULLER, SWIMMING LESSON

seribulan

“I’m a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That’s the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.” — Shelby Foote

seribulan

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” — Ernst F. Schumacher

bianglala

“Did you ever want to be a writer?”
“No,” she said…“I only wanted to be a reader.”

ANN PATCHETT, COMMONWEALTH

bianglala

“The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us. I can see it in you, sure as I see it in me. You’re a daughter of the words. A girl with a story to tell.”

JAY KRISTOFF, NEVERNIGHT

bianglala

“Maisie had never owned a book and couldn’t imagine rereading anything when time was so short and the libraries so full.”

SARAH-JANE STRATFORD, RADIO GIRLS: A NOVEL

bianglala

“Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.”

NICOLA YOON, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

bianglala

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.”

VLADIMIR NABAKOV, LOLITA

bianglala

“Words from the books curl around each other
make little sense
until
I read them again
and again, the story
settling into memory. Too slow my teacher says.
Read Faster.
Too babyish, the teacher says.
Read older.
But I don’t want to read faster or older or
any way else that might
make the story disappear too quickly from where
it’s settling
inside my brain,
slowly becoming a part of me.
A story I will remember
long after I’ve read it for the second, third,
tenth, hundredth time.”

JACQUELINE WOODSON, BROWN GIRL DREAMING

bianglala

“One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.”

KATARINA BIVALD, THE READERS OF BROKEN WHEEL RECOMMEND

bianglala

“Literature had fueled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.”

KATE ATKINSON, A GOD IN RUINS

bianglala

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.”

RACHEL CAINE, INK AND BONE

bianglala

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”

HELENE HANFF, 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD

seribulan

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp. —JK Rowling

bianglala

"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect."

GEORGE R.R MARTIN

bianglala

"If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.

You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.

The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another."

NEIL GAIMAN

bianglala

"You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice."

BILLY COLLINS

bianglala

"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

ELMORE LEONARD

bianglala

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.

That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

bianglala

"10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer

Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing."

BRIAN CLARK