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

bianglala

"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."

ISABEL ALLENDE

bianglala

"Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.

Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.

Some, downright weird.

But then again, you’d have to be.

To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors."

CHRISTOPHER HOPPER

bianglala

"The secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ..."

JOHN GEDDES

bianglala

"Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the I’m a Fraud phase. You go through the I’ll Never Finish phase. And every once in a while you think, What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it’s received as such?"

LIN MANUEL MIRANDA

seribulan

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein

bianglala

"We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is."

DANIEL PENNAC

bianglala

"It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another."

STEPHEN CRANE

bianglala

"I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead."

KARL OVE KNAUSGARD

bianglala

"On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men."

HEATHER O'NEILL

bianglala

"Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language."

FRANCINE PROSE

bianglala

"To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated. This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines."

RICAHRD BAUSCH

bianglala

"People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves."

HAROLD BLOOM

bianglala

"The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort."

JAMIE L. HARDING

seribulan

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” — Ernest Hemingway

seribulan

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

bianglala

"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool."

STEVEN BURST

bianglala

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. "

EDWARD GIBBON

bianglala

"Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home."

EILEEN MYLES

bianglala

"I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people."

MARGARET WISE BROWN

bianglala

"It’s amazing what people create using their pain. Work that is touched by melancholy has its own unique beauty. Even the word ‘melancholy’ is pretty, the way it rolls on your tongue. I think sadness adds something to literature that is unique. It’s an ingredient like . . .” I thought for a moment. “Like salt. Salt has that power to completely transform a dish. I think sadness has that same transformative effect in literature."

LANG LEAV