#hors

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#books #literature #reading #writing #read

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#disappointment #epigrams #fandom #on-writing #similes

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#authority

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ↗

— Logan Pearsall Smith

#authority

It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#horses #ireland #monsters #november #fantasy

For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#english

Sean reaches between us and slides a thin bracelet of red ribbons over my free hand. Lifting my arm, he presses his lips against the inside of my wrist. I'm utterly still; I feel my pulse tap several times against his lips, and then he releases my hand. "For luck," he says. He takes Dove's lead from me. "Sean," I say, and he turns. I take his chin and kiss his lips, hard. I'm reminded, all of a sudden, of that first day on the beach, when I pulled his head from the water. "For luck," I say to his startled face. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#horses #kiss #luck #puck #race

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#least #metaphors #most #space #truth

No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#books #brains #sleep #underwear #authority

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. ↗

— William Goldman

#doubts #self-doubt #writing #doubt