All Quotes By Tag: Reading

“Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.”

“Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”

“It is said that you can’t write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can’t read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well…..problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.”

“Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: ‘Reading histories of others–Crispus Attucks through all wars–Richard Allen–Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley–Sojourner Truth–Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.”

“I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.”

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.”

“The paper is patient, but the reader is not.”

“There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.”

“Keep on reading, thinking, doing and writing! Words keep introducing their friends to you.”

“Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.”

“I love pop culture — the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That’s why I said I don’t like elitism.”

“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide– a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”

“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.”