All Quotes By Tag: Books
“Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life’s work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.”
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“Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.”
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“[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.”
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“I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.”
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“When a day goes by and I haven’t written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.”
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“All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are”
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“The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
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“Life’s adventures make great reading!”
“Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn’t you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.”
“Many people can and have written books, but many have nothing to say.”
“That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren’t made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.”
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“So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.”
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“… a writer concocts a different story for every reader.”
“I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.”
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