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Books Quotes

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Books Quotes

“Good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, and so on. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.”

“A writer can do without food for a few hours but not without the sight of books.”

“Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.”

“If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.”

“As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a smaller number of words.”

“Clichés are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.”

“And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet to open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.”

“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”

“A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.”

“Think of it like this: people are kind of like books. On the outside, we might appear to be one thing, but on the inside, we are another. Some of us are fresh new books, recently published or in their prime of popularity. Some are big books, some small. There are old, worn out books that have been loved but are now falling apart. It’s about how you look at it. You may have been left on an old shelf collecting dust, but it’ll always be just until the next person comes around and decides they want it. Our books are never finished. We write ourselves a future, we decide our fate.”