Best literature & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

Source: A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers

“What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.”

Source: The Immoralist

“If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.”

People Ifs Knows Way Writing Important Book Certain Literature Like You Assuming Tone Dislike Sentimentality

Author:Ben Gibbard

“There's that lovely thing for the first month or two of writing a new book: OK, I don't know what that character's going to do, but we'll find out later. After about three or four months you come to that bit where you've got to put some plot in before it's too late, and you have to go back and start inserting plot, and, ooh, I've left out the literature, OK, lets put some in.”

Knows Writing Firsts Two Book Character Three Literature Left Bits Four Months Late Lovely Too Late Plot Left Out New Books Lovely Things Before It's Too Late

Author:Terry Pratchett

“My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.”

Ifs Writing Stories Romance Literature Fiction Novel Love Story Genre Dramatic Rejected Sections Bookstores Romance Novel

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.”

Writing Stories Literature Walks Steps Path Walking Compact

Book:The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Source: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

“Long ago, during my apprenticeship in the wine trade, I learned that wine is more than the sum of its parts, and more than an expression of its physical origin. The real significance of wine as the nexus of just about everything became clearer to me when I started writing about it. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere.”

Way Writing Long Real Found Literature Community Expression Draws Economics Trade Wine Realms Significance Long Ago Traveled Apprenticeship Nexus

Book:A Carafe of Red

Source: A Carafe of Red

“As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.”

“The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.”

“The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.”

Writing Age Literature Nations Sports Animal Imagine Weapons Lions Stakes Mail Sanctions Tease Patron Diversion Paws Armour Boars

Book:The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq

“Truth, like beauty, varies its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literatures of his own age. As the manners of nations vary, new topicks of persuasion become necessary, and new combinations of imagery are produced; and he that can accommodate himself to the reigning taste, may always have readers who perhaps would not have looked upon better performances.”

Source: The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

“Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.”

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An Essay on His Life and Genius

“As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.”

Writing Years Lasts Literature Five Subjects Changed Twenties Climate Five Years Astonishing Last Five Years

Author:Anthony Holden

“He did once say the time to worry is when they stop writing about you but again I think that was pretty token of the coverage was very respectful, he rather resented the intrusions on his private life, but that was about it.”

Thinking Writing Literature Worry Private Life Respectful Coverage Tokens Intrusion

Author:Anthony Holden

“Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.”

Ifs Writing May Book Literature Player Majors Insisting

Author:David Guterson

“I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's nothing that says Hitman will be collected, though it might be.”

Writing Might Literature Assuming Hitman

Author:Garth Ennis

“When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.”

Thinking Writing Different Literature Think Different

Author:Howard Nemerov

“You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.”

Giving Writing Literature House Wish Chance Wife Style Fortune Expensive Hostage

Author:Irwin Shaw

“I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.”

Writing Would Be Literature Memoir Pleasant

Author:Jim Harrison

“I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.”

Writing Hands Happens Literature Type

Author:John le Carre

“We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.”

Writing Firsts Stories Wanted Literature Picks

Author:Kevin J. Anderson

“If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.”

Ifs Writing Literature Saga

Author:Leslie Charteris

“When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.”

Writing Children Literature Fiction Four Needed Comfortable Legs Genre Height Chairs Length

Author:Mark Haddon

“I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world.”

World Writing Book Literature Inspired Changing The World

Author:Natan Sharansky

“What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.”

People Writing Literature Challenges Novel Plans

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.”

Ifs Writing Literature Knowing Reader Expectations Categories Framework

Author:Nora Roberts

“I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.”

Writing Art Enough Reading Literature Christ Realizing Rooms Too Much Hair Cures Spit Arthur Indescribable Leper Plasters Blisters Reading Room

Author:Gustave Flaubert

“The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.”

Writing May Soul Desire Literature Cold Wit

Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“To write for children at all is an act of faith.”

Writing Children Literature Children's Literature

Author:Madeleine L'Engle

“If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.”

Ifs Want Writing Children Book Literature Difficult Adults Children's Literature Children Book

Author:Madeleine L'Engle

“Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.”

World Want Writing Believe Kind Doe Moving Literature Answers Conversation

Author:Barbara Kingsolver

“Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.”

Writing Wells Heart Use Reality Religion Order Courses Literature Scientist Metaphor Patterns Rational Confusion Aesthetic Physicist

Author:Taner Edis

“When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.”

Way Writing Trying Wells Looks Helping Running Used Reading Literature Process Loses Written Tools Running Away Escapism Losing Yourself

Author:Karl Ove Knausgard

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

Writing Trying Reason Reality Literature Fiction Distance Journalism Journalist Novelists Petty Fake People

Book:Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader

Source: Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader

“The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.”

Writing Littles Might Turns Literature Economy Careful Novelists Unwilling Housewife

Book:In Search of a Character: Two African Journals

Source: In Search of a Character: Two African Journals

“There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.”

Thinking Men Should Writing Literature

Author:Marguerite Duras

“It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.”

People World Should Writing Humans Ideas Literature Difficult Changing The World

Author:Dorothy Allison

“Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.”

Men Writing Book Matter Remember Literature Names Opinion Heard Influence Ignorance Poet Every Man Drunk Milk Cows Mentor Nurture

Author:Shmuel Yosef Agnon

“The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.”

World Writing Facts Pain Form Literature Creating Originals Ghost Recognition Peculiar Composition Composing Outcast Translators Writing Words

Author:Lydia Davis

“By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.”

Writing Years Wells Age Literature Nine Contemporary Thirty Honour Translations Polish Thirty Years Thorough Thorough Knowledge

Author:Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

“There is nothing more important than writing well for the young, if literature is to have a continuance ... They will inherit the earth; and nothing that we value will endure in the world unless they can be persuaded to value it too.”

Ifs World Writing Wells Important Earth Young Values Literature Endure Children's Literature Continuance Writing Well

Author:Jill Paton Walsh

“I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.”

Thinking Writing Believe Stories Jobs Literature

Author:Naomi Shihab Nye

“I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.”

Ifs Needs Writing I Can Literature Imagination Creative Majors Creative Writing Workshops Writing Workshop

Author:Vikas Swarup

“I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.”

Writing Children Book Literature Easier Innocence Writing A Book Children Book

Author:Mark Haddon

“I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.”

Thinking Writing Stills Seems Literature Interesting Travel Exotic

Author:Mark Haddon

“Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.”

People Writing Book Literature Forget Boring Screens Jane Austen

Author:Mark Haddon

“I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.”

Writing Running Remember Literature Gay Who You Are Running Away Dentist Being Gay Postman

Author:Mark Haddon

“While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.”

Source: H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)

“No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.”

Writing Kind Ideas Lying Literature Honor Crafts Mystical Harbors Your Honor

Book:Great House: A Novel

Source: Great House: A Novel

“What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.”

Thinking Writing May Doe Problem Literature Process Share Solve

Author:Sabina Murray

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