Book And Writing Quotes

#1. There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

Jack Prelutsky

#2. Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.

Carolyn Hart

#3. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

Jane Yolen

#4. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

Michael Longley

#5. Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question Why should I buy this book?

Guy Kawasaki

#6. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

#7. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#8. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#9. I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work.

Wilbur Smith

#10. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.

Andrea Seigel

#11. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.

Terry Pratchett

#12. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

Kingsley Amis

#13. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.

Patti Smith

#14. The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.

Albert Einstein

#15. But we were different now. I wanted only his pain, and judging from the girl he'd come home with last night, Madoc was still the same. A user.

Penelope Douglas

#16. People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.

Jesse Kellerman

#17. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.

Jessica Valenti

#18. The openness of such networked devices reflects our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library.

Jay David Bolter

#19. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#20. Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he'd drop you.

Dick Schaap

#21. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

Jonathan Franzen

#22. Either way, you wrote the book and now you're complaining about the reviews I'm giving it," I quipped.
"Fair enough." He held up his hands, "I'm going to start writing the sequel which will be considerably less narcissistic. Will you read it?"
"Only if every other girl on campus hasn't.

Tarryn Fisher

#23. I'm probably the most loquacious author when it comes to my dedications. The reason is there is some symbolism there. I've been writing these books, bringing these stories to my readers who I love so much, and I have a greater love for my family.

Karen Kingsbury

#24. I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.

Isaac Marion

#25. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

Paul Auster

#26. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize

Arthur Hertzberg

#27. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.

Gail Carriger

#28. I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.

Mandy Moore

#29. The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.

Jodi Picoult

#30. I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Donald Miller

#31. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.

Robin Sacredfire

#32. Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

Ben H. Winters

#33. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Morris West

#34. I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

Lawrence Wright

#35. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

James Frey

#36. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Charles De Lint

#37. Everybody should write a book whether you get it published or not because the experience of sort of taking it all and throwing it down on paper is unbelievably cathartic.

Gary Dell'Abate

#38. I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.

Elvis Costello

#39. I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

Isabel Allende

#40. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

John Niven

#41. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Cheryl Strayed

#42. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

Anne Enright

#43. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.

Ashwin Sanghi

#44. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

Anne Enright

#45. I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things.

Brian Regan

#46. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.

Daniel Kehlmann

#47. I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.

Trudi Canavan

#48. Maybe we should all just shut up and read a good book.

Mary Sisney

#49. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.

Emma Donoghue

#50. Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

Damon Galgut

#51. I write titles that are confrontational. I write titles that make people want to pick up a book and find out more about it. I write good books; I write great titles though.

Larry Winget

#52. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#53. When people climb a mountain, they don't stay there. They come back down and tell everyone they climbed a mountain. Writing a book is like that. If you write a book, you should tell everyone.

Bob Howard

#54. I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

Elena Ferrante

#55. At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.

Diane Setterfield

#56. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.

Bill Hicks

#57. I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

Ernest Hemingway,

#58. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.

Jonathan Swift

#59. No one can tell you what you can and cannot put in your book. So be brave and just write!

Chrys Fey

#60. I hope never to retire. I write so many because it's the thing I like to do most - to write. And if you write every day, you just naturally get a lot of books.

Eve Bunting

#61. For such a long time, when you're a writer, you really are just writing for yourself, and maybe a few friends. So it's really amazing when your book gets out there and more people are reading and responding to it. It really makes the world of the books feel real.

Cassandra Clare

#62. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

Stephen King

#63. Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don't write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by.

Leon Nacson

#64. Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.

Ishmael Reed

#65. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.

Scott Berkun

#66. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

Edward Abbey

#67. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.

David Bezmozgis

#68. During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.

J.K. Rowling

#69. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

J.D. Salinger

#70. One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.

Ellen Potter

#71. He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Jennifer Lanthier

#72. A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

James Scott Bell

#73. Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm ... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

Freeman Dyson

#74. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.

William Zinsser

#75. Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#76. Fallon and I were a lot like them. Only I didn't love her, and she didn't love me. I was infatuated with her once - and loved that she let me take my pubescent urges out on her - but we weren't in love.

Penelope Douglas

#77. Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

Chang-rae Lee

#78. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.

Sherry Thomas

#79. Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.

Ellen Hopkins

#80. I hear, Western people say, "The world was created for us." If tigers could write books, they would say, man was created for them and that man is a most sinful animal, because he does not allow him (the tiger) to catch him easily. The worm that crawls under your feet today is a God to be.

Swami Vivekananda

#81. Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

Rick Yancey

#82. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.

Robert Walser

#83. These people that write books on how to succeed and how to think positively make millions because it's something that doesn't occur naturally.

Rush Limbaugh

#84. When you're writing a book, you don't want it to be overly trendy because you want people to enjoy it for years and refer back to it.

Lauren Conrad

#85. Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell - that's the hard part.

Jay Taylor

#86. Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#87. I write both at home and at coffee shops, and I have a terrible work ethic - I have a tendency to write most of my books right before the deadline. I'm trying to work on that, but so far, I'm not getting any more organized.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#88. I had so much fun writing this book and I want readers to have fun also. A Passion for Prying is a feel-good, fun read. It's like eating a delicious, sinful hot fudge sundae--pure fun and indulgence.

Nancy Mangano

#89. When it's time to settle into the serial monogamy inherent in writing a book (although, between you and me, I secretly practice biblio-polygamy - I can't help myself),

Cathleen Rountree

#90. I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

Anthony Storr

#91. I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.

Danica McKellar

#92. I think we're on a journey ... It was very easy to write about my past in my book, but writing about the present is all a new chapter. I hope that people find this journey fascinating, informative and educational.

Donna Karan

#93. When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.

Amish Tripathi

#94. The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical ... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.

Morris Kline

#95. I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

Jack Vance

#96. A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'

Dennis Christopher

#97. Energy is a being yet is not. For it to materialise it must be pure thus it turns into a crystal like form.
That is the true being of the Elders and the Three Immortal Blades.
And your body has been cursed with it.
Max Jacket- The Three Immortal Blades

Kia Carrington-Russell

#98. There is no substitute for practical experience, and if you want to write about people you ought to put down that comic book and go out and meet some of them rather than studying the way that Stan Lee or Chris Claremont depict people.

Alan Moore

#99. One of the things I love most about acting, that I get to do research and read books, but it's just for me and I don't have to write about it.

Ruby Bentall

#100. Brendan O'Meara's Six Weeks in Saratoga is a victory to be savored by those who treasure good writing in general and tales of the track in particular. Horses may win races, but they also win hearts as this impressive book proves beyond doubt. A memorable, sure-footed debut.

Madeleine Blais