# What are your favorite quotes about books or writing?



## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Do you have any favourite quotes about books or writing?

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island… and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life." (Walt Disney 1901-66.)

"A book is a gift you can keep on opening" (anonymous child)


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## crebel (Jan 15, 2009)

See my signature line!

Edited to add the quote for those who may have signatures turned off:

"A book, I think, is very like a little golden door.
That takes me into places where I've never been before.
It leads me into fairyland or countries strange and far.
And, best of all, the golden door always stands ajar." - Adelaide Love


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

"Nobody steals books but your friends." ~ Roger Zelazny in _The Guns of Avalon_

Terry Pratchett has quite a few. A fairly random sampling:

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read." ~ _Guards! Guards!_

"The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality" ~ also _Guards! Guards!_

"Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book." ~ _Soul Music_ (This might be my favorite of these quotes.  )

"'Er ... I dinnae wanta be a knee aboot this, but why is ye all here freezin' tae death?'
'Our oxen wandered off and, alas, the snow's too deep to walk through' said Mr Swinsley.
'Aye. But youse got a stove and all them dry ol' books,' said the dark figure.
'Yes, we know,' said the librarian looking puzzled.
There was the kind of wretched pause you get when two people aren't going to understand each other's point of view at all." ~ _Wintersmith_


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

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

--Groucho Marx


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Just read this one on another forum

In an obscure French film called "Swimming Pool" Charlotte Rampling's character, a writer's blocked author, is told by her publisher that another author whom she detests has just won an award. She replies: "*Awards are like haemorrhoids. Sooner or later every arsehole gets one."*


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Kathleen Norris (1880-1966).


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## intinst (Dec 23, 2008)

From my signature:
A good one for writers, maybe especially Fantasy or Sci/Fi,
"Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the
engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair." Annie Dillard

And for both writers and readers, (Tongue in cheek)
"A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits."  Edith Sitwell


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## PaulLev (Nov 2, 2012)

“Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.” 
― Erle Stanley Gardner


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## marianneg (Nov 4, 2008)

I chose this one to put on my Kindle's cover:


Stephen King said:


> Books are a uniquely portable magic.


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## Chris Dietzel (Apr 2, 2013)

PaulLev said:


> "Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check."
> ― Erle Stanley Gardner


I love this! That's really funny.

One I've always liked is:

"There's a word for writers who never say die&#8230; the word is published." - JA Konrath


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## JWTapper (Nov 26, 2014)

I posted this in a similar thread but I like it enough to use it again. Kind of what a quotable quote is all about and it describes the desire to write very clearly:

"_If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you._" - Henry Rollins


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

When a famous author was asked, "What's the best thing to write to earn money?" He replied, "Ransom notes."  

I can never remember who said this (or where I saved it on the computer   )


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## nigel p bird (Feb 4, 2011)

Some words from Hugh C Rae (aka Jessica Stirling, aka Robert Crawford):

“The squalid truth is that to put approximately 150,000 words of reasonably intelligible prose on screen, or on paper for that matter, requires even the most glamorous author to park his or her bum on a chair for about as long as it takes to paint the Forth Bridge.”

and 

“It’s tough at times and it’s hard to make a decent living out of scattering words on a page but, oh boy, when it sings, it really sings – and, like the man says, it sure beats working.”


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## rsscheyer (Feb 21, 2014)

Not sure who said this, but it is one of my favorite writing quotes:

Writing is easy, just sit down next to a typewriter and open a vein.


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

rsscheyer said:


> Not sure who said this, but it is one of my favorite writing quotes:
> 
> Writing is easy, just sit down next to a typewriter and open a vein.


or wait until tiny droplets of blood appear on your brow.


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## Daniel Harvell (Jun 21, 2013)

"Never judge a book by its movie."

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." - Paul Sweeney

"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves." - George Plimpton


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## Chris Dietzel (Apr 2, 2013)

"I wrote it because it was the book I wanted to read and it didn't exist yet."  -  Toni Morrison


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. 

Thomas Jefferson


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

"Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book; the myriad temptations are overwhelming."
- Nero Wolfe, _The Mother Hunt_ (1963)

Slightly out of context. 

Mike


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Another from Mr. Zelazny:

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows." ~ _Nine Princes in Amber_


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## J.B. (Aug 15, 2014)

I just wanted to say - this is a great thread - thanks everyone for your contributions. I'm still trying to come up with something to add.


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## cagnes (Oct 13, 2009)

From my signature....

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one."  ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

BOOKS HAVE IT ALL​
At home everybody read. My mother, my father and my grandparents. As I looked at their faces bending over their books I noticed that sometimes they smiled, sometimes they looked grave, sometimes they turned the page with excitement, and I wondered what was happening to them while they read. They didn't seem to hear if I spoke to them and if they eventually did listen to me it was as if they had come back from somewhere. Why didn't they take me with them? What was in the books? What was that secret they didn't share with me?
Then I learnt to read. I learnt the secret of the books. That they have everything in them. Not just fairies, goblins, princesses and wicked witches, but you and me too, our joys, our worries, our hopes, our sorrows; good and bad, true and false, nature and the universe - it's all there in the books. Open your books! Let them share all their secrets with you.

_ ~ from the message for 2001 International Children's Book Day by Eva Janikovszky._


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## Tony Richards (Jul 6, 2011)

"The road to writing success is lined with the skulls of those who gave up" -- Harry Harrison, sf author.


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## JR. (Dec 10, 2014)

rsscheyer said:


> Not sure who said this, but it is one of my favorite writing quotes:
> 
> Writing is easy, just sit down next to a typewriter and open a vein.


Hemingway

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."


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## Daniel Harvell (Jun 21, 2013)

JR. said:


> Hemingway
> 
> "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."


YES! One of my favorite quotes too!


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## Brownskins (Nov 18, 2011)

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. - C.S. Lewis (Letters to an American Lady, in response to the question, “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?”)


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## BobPage (Mar 16, 2012)

“In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them." ~Rod Serling~


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

I never write metropolis for seven cents when I can get the same price for city - Mark Twain. (he was paid per word)


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

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.
- Robert Benchley


Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.‖ ― Mark Twain


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## Chris Dietzel (Apr 2, 2013)

Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:


> Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.‖ ― Mark Twain


I love this one!


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## Carrie Rubin (Nov 19, 2012)

I've always liked this one by Wayson Choy (though I suspect other writers have said something similar):  “The only secret to writing is AC: Ass on Chair.”


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## Ken Pelham (Dec 27, 2014)

Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. 

--Carl Sagan


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

NogDog said:


> "'Er ... I dinnae wanta be a knee aboot this, but why is ye all here freezin' tae death?'
> 'Our oxen wandered off and, alas, the snow's too deep to walk through' said Mr Swinsley.
> 'Aye. But youse got a stove and all them dry ol' books,' said the dark figure.
> 'Yes, we know,' said the librarian looking puzzled.
> There was the kind of wretched pause you get when two people aren't going to understand each other's point of view at all." ~ _Wintersmith_


I love Terry Pratchett's world-view. I wish I could live in the Library of the Unseen University, with its Mobius shelves.


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

"The act of sustained, empathic immersion in literary art deepens the emotions and expands the mind. It gives us more lives than the one we are assigned." ― Malcolm Knox

"As a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world." ― Neil Gaiman


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## BobPage (Mar 16, 2012)

"so you want to be a writer

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was. ~Charles Bukowski~


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

"Everything in the world exists to end up in a book."

Stephan Mallarme (French poet)


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## going going gone (Jun 4, 2013)

"I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world" - Murakami.


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## AmandaLove (Oct 15, 2014)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”  Albert Einstein

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it” Roald Dahl

"The first draft of anything is shit." Ernest Hemingway & "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." I noticed others have this one! So true.



I also love the one I read on this thread - first time I've seen it : "The only secret to writing is AC: Ass on Chair."


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Book lovers never go to bed alone    (heard on a TV show)


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## lmroth12 (Nov 15, 2012)

The question the March family in *Little Women * asked Jo when deeply absorbed in writing: "Does genius burn, Jo?"

if it did they knew better than to disturb her. Woe to the man, woman, or child who dared to interrupt her when the writing fit came upon her!


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

From Terry Pratchett's _A Slip of the Keyboard_:

"People really do ask us: How do you get published? with a strong implication that there must be more to it than, well, writing a decent book and sending it to publishers until one of them gives in."


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## 67499 (Feb 4, 2013)

"I consider writing an adventure of discovery in which I am trying to find out what I think. If I knew what was there in advance I wouldn't need to write." -- Daniel Boorstin


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## Ryan Kurr (Dec 23, 2014)

"People will read again!" - Vanilla Sky


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity.        It's impossible to put down.


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## hs (Feb 15, 2011)

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
- Philip Pullman

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” 
- Stephen King

"I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done."
- Steven Wright


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## Thoughtfleditor (Feb 27, 2015)

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”  ― Elmore Leonard


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## Happy chick (Mar 3, 2015)

I like this one.

"One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us." 
— Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))


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## Chris Dietzel (Apr 2, 2013)

cadle-sparks said:


> "I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world" - Murakami.


In addition to this Murakami quote, I'd add: "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood


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## William Meikle (Apr 19, 2010)

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”  ― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Books are good enough in their own way but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” 
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.” 
― Robert Louis Stevenson


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

PJ O'Rourke.


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## danpadavona (Sep 25, 2014)

"A body of work, therefore, reveals the intellectual and emotional progress of the writer, and is a map of his soul. It’s both terrifying and liberating to consider this aspect of being a novelist."
- Dean Koontz


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## ElisabethGFoley (Nov 20, 2011)

"Good writing can only be learned from good writing...we learn not from studying a book, but from enjoying it." ~ E.M. Forster

"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing." ~ Eugene Ionesco

“It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

"A book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us."--Franz Kafka. The full quote goes includes something like this: "If a book does not hit me on the head, what is it for?"

It has been the beacon guiding me in the darkness. Except when it has not.


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