...Quotables @ Bookshelf ...

LelaRentaka7

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”
― David Almond, My Name Is Mina

LelaRentaka7

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

seribulan

LelaRentaka7

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

LelaRentaka7

“When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

LelaRentaka7

"We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.”
― Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life

LelaRentaka7

“I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

LelaRentaka7

" It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

LelaRentaka7

“I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

LelaRentaka7

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

LelaRentaka7

" I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

LelaRentaka7

Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

LelaRentaka7

“a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.”
― Roland Smith, Peak

LelaRentaka7

“We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.”
― Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

LelaRentaka7

“My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. ”
― Isabel Allende, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

LelaRentaka7

“I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

LelaRentaka7

“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”
― Andre Dubus III, Townie

LelaRentaka7

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

LelaRentaka7

“I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

LelaRentaka7

“A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!”
― Joseph Conrad, The Lagoon