https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/writing-books
Reading and Writing
“The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin.”― Allison Hoover Bartlett, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
They say write the book you want to read. When I first started writing fiction, with nothing but ideas and enthusiasm and an ignorance of the elements of storytelling, this is the book I would have wanted as my guide.
-Richie Billing, A Fantasy Writers' Handbook
“We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor
“He is like a superhero, practicing living a normal life before starting his career as a defender of libraries, books, and the all-important art of reading. When elections come, and the town realizes the threat it is facing, he will fight for what is good and right in the world, and protect us from disaster.”
― Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared
“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Quotations
"It is a joy to find thoughts I might have beautifully
expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than myself." -Marlene Dictrich
Books (BioOptic Organized Knowledge Devise.)
“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Books opened up a whole new world to me. Through them I discovered new ideas, traveled to new places, and met new people. Books helped me learn to understand other people and they taught me a lot about myself. ... Some books you never forget. Some characters become your friends for life.
-Judy Blume
WE LOVE BOOKS, and we bet you do, too. We especially love books that inspire, heal, and transform lives. We’ve all found that life becomes richer when we’re reading a great book. You go to sleep at night feeling that your time on Earth is more valuable, your experience here more worthwhile. You wake up seeing yourself, other people, and the world differently. This is real magic—
-Jack Canfield, You've GOT to Read This Book!
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
― Agatha Christie, The Clocks
“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”
― Paulo Coelho
“Think books aren't scary? Well, think about this: You can't spell "Book" without "Boo!”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America
“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
I knew how to visit the creatures who would never be sighted in the zoos or the museum or the woods. They were waiting for me in books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty-six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner or exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me in the pages of books. – Neil Gaiman, Unnatural Creatures.
“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone
“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”
― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2
“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”
― Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway
His books were the closest thing he had to furniture
and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.
-Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren
“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx
“Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer
“I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.”
― Chaim Potok, The Promise
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, The Catcher in the Rye
“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
“We biblioholics have different priorities. We've got all our clothes in our suitcase in two minutes flat, and then we spend three hours and fifty-eight minutes deciding which books to bring.”
― Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction
“Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life is Worth Living
“It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.”
― Gary Soto
“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”
― Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper
“A book, being a physical object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because of all these things, a book is a friend. It’s not just the content, but the physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally.”
― Mo Willems
Book Buyers
It's proving difficult to gather an audience. It's not just that nearly everything on the Internet is free. It's that there is just so much stuff. If I want to learn how to set up a particular backpacking tent, I can find twenty videos that will show me how. If I want instruction on how to play a particular song on the ukulele, I can find fifty videos. If I want to learn about the Immaculate Conception, I can find well over a hundred videos. It's difficult for any one of those to stand out.-Karl Keating
Substitute
Books for Videos and the same principle applies.
Genre
“Our original idea was to write a book titled Fifty Shades of the Hunger Games, by J.K. Rowling with Stephen King: A John Grisham Novel.”― Dave Barry, Lunatics
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.”
― Alan Moore
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone.
If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German,
you can look down on everyone.
If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books,
you can at least look down on mystery readers.
Mystery readers have sci-fi readers.
Sci-fi can look down on fantasy.
And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness.
I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years,
people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike.
Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction.
Shakespeare wrote popular fiction
—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist.
Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius.
The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”.
The Latin root simply means “letters”.
Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t.
For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics.
For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives.
Those connections happen because the books
successfully communicate something real about the human experience.
Sure, there are trashy books that do really well,
but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity.
What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature
—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent Weeks
Top Selling Fiction Writers
“To die, to sleep -To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,
For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. ”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
“People don't roll around naked in my books. I do allow them to go to bed if they're married, but it's all very wonderful and the moon beams.”
Barbara Cartland, Barbara Cartland, 98, Best-Selling Author Who Prized Old-Fashioned Romance, Dies (May 22, 2000) NY Times
By Richard Severo
“Maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn. And that's why they're here. You'll have that gift forever.”
― Danielle Steel, The Gift
"I won't leave any unfinished manuscripts. I'll live till I'm 200 years old, and I'll write all the stories that are in me. Put it on my tombstone: 'He finished his job and went home.' "
Harold Robbins -1986 interview
I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.
Georges Simenon Chez Simenon October 24, 1971 Archive: NY Times By ISRAEL SHENKER
“I'm good at exploring roofs. You never know when that kind of thing comes in useful.”
― Enid Blyton, The Rubadub Mystery
“Nothing like having a bucket of cold water flung over you to make you see things as they really are!”
― Enid Blyton, Five Have a Mystery to Solve
“You don't know what can happen tomorrow. Life is like a novel, isn't it? It's filled with suspense. You never know what's going to happen until you turn the page.”
― Sidney Sheldon
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling
"Look out!" This sharp cry was followed closely by the shrill, warning whistle of the New York Express. "Stop that horse!"
"They'll be killed!"
Although these horrified exclamations broke from the
lips of the spectators on the station platform, not one of the speakers possessed the courage or presence of mind to check the animal that was whirling two human beings toward a sudden and violent death.
Gilbert Patton as Burt L Standish, The Boy from the West (1894)
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss
Whether fiction for escape and inspiration, or nonfiction that illuminates topical interests, the editors seek the best prose they can find. The books where that prose ends up residing become treasured personal possessions, on shelves in homes, or available in libraries, or accessible in today’s vast web resources. Books, imperishable and enduring, feed the
soul. And some of the best—the most enduring of all—are not the newest. Old writers, many of them under the earth for decades, and their stories have new life every time a reader picks up a book. That is exactly why the book you are holding right now—where these old stories are gaining new life—is the source of great pleasure for this editor.
Lamar Underwood Great American Hunting Stories (Classic) (2019)
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