Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
I write to get ideas out of my head
Write like no one is reading.
The Bible, most influential book, which have the ability to transform many lives.
Desire to learn.
Desire to read.
Desire to think.
Desire to write.
So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.
I write things that I would like to read myself.
Don't just read to read. Read to understand.
The show must go on, and so must The Book.
If you don't write, then read.
There are more writers who read than readers who write.
Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read - unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.
Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.
They're book addicts.
A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.
A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task !
Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.
I read the writings of great men and women so that I can think bigger thoughts.
Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
Don't be jealous, be agressive. Make 2012 yours!
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.
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
A word after a word after a word is power.
A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough-I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.
The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.
I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God.
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.
Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.
Write when you can't stop writing. Read when you stopped writing!
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people - people who supposedly want to write - read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.
Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.
Hard writing makes easy reading.
Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
Somebody is observing my writings, I know that.
That's one reason why I keep reading and writing.
If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.
Above all things - read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.
Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.
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.
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.
I love pop culture - the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that.
That's why I said I don't like elitism.