Quotes: Writing, Books, Libraries

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

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

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Samuel Johnson

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total. ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

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

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. ~Author Unknown

Medicine for the soul. ~Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread. ~François Mauriac


The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book. ~André Maurois

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. ~J. Swartz

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. ~Amos Bronson Alcott

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. ~Henry David Thoreau

Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
~Richard Armour, "Library"

A great library contains the diary of the human race. ~George Mercer Dawson