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

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“Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.”
― Gregory McDonald

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“I get angry about things, then go on and work.”
― Toni Morrison

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“I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.”
― Gustave Flaubert

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“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”
― Gustave Flaubert

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“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”
― Sholem Asch

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“No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."
― David McCullough

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“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.”
― James J. Kilpatrick

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“When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.”
― Preston Sturges

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“Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.
My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

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“When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.”
― Robin McKinley

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Dæmons, for example, might otherwise be only a meaningless decoration, adding nothing to the story: but I use them to embody and picture some truths about human personality which I couldn't picture so easily without them. I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvelous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen?”
― Philip Pullman

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“He’s an indulgent sort of man……
With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships.”
― Coco J. Ginger

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“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson

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“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
― Edna Ferber

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“The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.”
― Stephen King

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“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”
― May Sarton

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“Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives”
― Alfred de Musset

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“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”
― Leo Rosten

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“I know how you feel because I’ve been there too. I’ve hated and I’ve loved. I’ve seen my demons root and crawl and my angels branch and soar. I've died within myself and lived a thousand different lives. I too fight the same war and I too am drowning in the puddles of self-consciousness this world created.”
― Robert M. Drake