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

seribulan

“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty, WD

WhiskeyScotch

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

― Tom Waits

WhiskeyScotch

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”

― Iris Murdoch

WhiskeyScotch

“I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.”

― Philip Pullman

WhiskeyScotch

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

― Ernest Hemingway

WhiskeyScotch

“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

― Junot Díaz

WhiskeyScotch

“You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.”

― Joss Whedon

WhiskeyScotch

“I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.”

― Julia Quinn

WhiskeyScotch

“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.”

― André Gide

WhiskeyScotch

“Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”

― E.B. White

seribulan

“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard

WhiskeyScotch

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”

― Edward Albee

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“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

― Nikki Giovanni

WhiskeyScotch

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

― George Orwell

WhiskeyScotch

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

― Paulo Coelho

WhiskeyScotch

“Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.”

― Nicole Krauss

WhiskeyScotch

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.”

― Madeleine L'Engle

WhiskeyScotch

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

― Junot Díaz

WhiskeyScotch

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

― Cormac McCarthy