Writing And Reading Quotes

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

I think training your instinct comes from writing and reading. There's no big secret. And reading slush helps, as well; I'd recommend everyone edit a literary magazine at some point. It's time-consuming, but there's a lot to learn from other writers who are also learning. The patterns (twelve stories about whales in this batch?) are also interesting.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

One thing I like about writing is that it provides such a wonderful opportunity for confidential chats with readers. In the privacy of writing, and reading, we can discuss topics that are a little touchy, a bit embarrassing, and feel less alone in the process. Feeling consumed by memories from high school. Feeling wimpy. Feeling time-obsessed. Yearning for our fathers. Wishing we were taller, or shorter, or less average. To name just a few.

Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.