Quotes About Writing And Books

#1. When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

Mike Greenberg

#2. The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he'd submerged himself in work and writing and books.

Laird Barron

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

Carolyn Hart

#4. Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.

Alex Pareene

#5. 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

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

Guy Kawasaki

#7. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.

Lisa J. Shultz

#8. 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

#9. And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

Bernard Cornwell

#10. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

Mary Gordon

#11. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

Caroline Kennedy

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#15. Books are a gateway to the extraordinary, a portal for the unfettered imagination and limitless creativity.

Diana Jane Heath

#16. 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

#17. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.

Kristen Lamb

#18. My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.

Ana Monnar

#19. The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

Nancy Etchemendy

#20. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.

Michelle Phan

#21. I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

Anne Lamott

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. When I read my writing, am amazed by what I have captured in a given moments.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

Julia Glass

#32. 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.

E. Nesbit

#33. I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

Lalla Ward

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

Jamie L. Harding

#37. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.

S.A. Tawks

#38. 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

#39. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Robert Galbraith

#40. I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It's not so bad. I am really lucky.

Gene Wilder

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

Bill Hicks

#42. 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,

#43. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#44. 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

#45. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Carla H. Krueger

#46. Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

Stephen King

#47. And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.

Marquis De Sade

#48. If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.

Neil Gaiman

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. I love when I finish reading a chapter that I wrote and my cheeks hurt from smiling and all I can utter is, 'Wow.'

Richelle E. Goodrich

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. [A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

#62. If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.

Brett Armstrong

#63. 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

#64. There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

Adam Ross

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. To some extent, all authors are a little schizophrenic. We lead most of our lives in solitary confinement, living and breathing the books that we're writing.

Sophie Kinsella

#68. That kiss was amazing; it had all the passion and longing we had been holding onto for so long. That is when the dam finally broke for me and I started crying. I knew right then that Hunter was the only one I wanted. He was my happily ever after.

Megan Smith

#69. I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.

Alice McDermott

#70. 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

#71. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.

Briar Kit Esme

#72. I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.

Sue Grafton

#73. I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.

Bill Bryson

#74. Life is a book that someone else is reading - and you, a key character - hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#75. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.

Sanober Khan

#76. Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they're just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.

Zia Haider Rahman

#77. Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person's capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#78. I don't like writing romance in my books because that's the turning point of 90% of YA sci-fi/fantasy books and, quite frankly, it gets annoying after a while. The protagonist has more important things to worry about than boys and whether or not they like her.

Meghan Blistinsky

#79. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

#80. The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

Claudia Bakker

#81. Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

Aidan Chambers

#82. Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don't let stress steal your joy.

Sarra Cannon

#83. It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

Eric Hobsbawm

#84. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance.

J.K. Rowling

#85. I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

Roger Zelazny

#86. Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Virginia Woolf

#87. Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

John Sandford

#88. Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Richard Bach

#89. You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

Oscar Wilde

#90. For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

Sara Sheridan

#91. I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.

Sonya Hartnett

#92. Everyone's life is an evolution of emotions, spirit and beliefs. The storyline changes, plots thicken, main characters mature and new spiritual journeys begin. This is true of inspirational authors. Their books represent only the stages of their life. New triumphs of the soul have yet to be written!

Shannon L. Alder

#93. The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Shannon L. Alder

#94. I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.

Stephen Vincent Benet

#95. I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Anais Nin

#96. I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published ... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

Markus Zusak

#97. I lose it when I can't write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

Carla H. Krueger

#98. I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.

Rachel Joyce

#99. I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.

Robert A. Heinlein

#100. Your story must told.
Live a life legacy- written book or notes.
This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.

Lailah Gifty Akita