519 quotes found
“I'm often asked which author I am most inspired by, but I'm inspired by all authors. It takes a great deal of courage to pour your onto paper and watch silently as the world judges it loudly.”
“An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another worlda world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The authors voice...”
“I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.”
“The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.”
“. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.”
“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
“As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.”
“We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I d...”
“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and ...”
“Success and talent aren’t even in the same neighborhood.”
“In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience fo...”
“You can’t give what you don’t have. To write, you must read. To write well, read well.”
“You don’t become a good writer overnight. It takes persistence and repetition to gain mastery.”
“You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.”
“I’m a dot in the grand scheme of things. I don’t matter, not even to the other dots.”
“I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to ...”
“Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.”
“Some people are in misery of carrying the entire world’s pain on their shoulders. They are called writers.”
“If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?”
“Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.”
