Literature Quotes - Page 11

I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.

The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

My words, my writing, my actions - these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Words his soul danced to.

We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners
of them