608 quotes
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
— E.M. Forster
"I hate writing, I love having written."
— Dorothy Parker
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
— Charles Baudelaire
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
— Barbara Tuchman
"A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level."
— Jay-Z
"Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished."
— William Wordsworth
"Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man."
— Walt Whitman
"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf
"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."
— Umberto Eco
"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."
— Truman Capote
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
— Toni Morrison
"Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time."
— Terry Pratchett
"An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better."
— T. S. Eliot
"Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book."
— Siri Hustvedt
"A book is not completed till it's read."
— Salman Rushdie
"So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow."
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
— Rudyard Kipling
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
— Robert Frost
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
— Ray Bradbury
"Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours."
— Rainer Maria Rilke