Fools admire everything in an author of reputation. For my part, I read only to please myself. I like only that which serves my purpose.
Authors Quotes
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice and just as the touch on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice […]
When I was a ten-year-old book worm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a […]
The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
Be sure to go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Those of us we have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.
Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.
The story is, I fear, suffocatingly subjective; the kind of thing I have never written before and shall probably never write again. I have tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the least […]
You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of […]
