Quotes on Reading And Writing

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

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.

You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron. "Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late.

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.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

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.

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