Hungry for beautiful words, the fox comes rooting around in the hedge, almost too close to the fire. He reads my mind with one glance and is gone. All my poetry is now trotting around the bushes inside him, maybe some day to be partly eaten or left t...
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out o...
When I was 15 years old, I read an article about Ivan Boesky, the well-known takeover trader - turned out years later it was all on inside information! But before that came to light, he was very successful, very flamboyant. And I thought, 'This is wh...
I do not think there is a person in this world who has been a more ardent admirer of than I have been. . His memory calls forth my most sincere homage, love, and esteem. {Burbank on the great , whom he admired so much that he requested 's eulogy for ...
If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our p...
Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language ...
We know that we are continually subjected to a huge range of sensory inputs and internal experiences of sensations and thoughts. In fact, almost anything existing in our universe, that can come into human and other animals' purview, can be experience...
Nature is a good teacher; he who can read the nature well, he can learn sagacious things belong to life from it. Once you stepped in the nature, your philosophical education starts. A black vulture teaches you many things; a bear teaches you many thi...
I have loved you without a reason beyond the limits of common sense and I have named you as my precious, my dream and my hope. And I have loved you in every poem that I have wrote and I have longed for you to read all the words that have pondered in ...
Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes...). We have these impossibly high standards and we'll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I fe...
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance ...
Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it's far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.” "Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness. There's love and em...
I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction ...
I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers an...
And at 3am you sit near the window and wonder if there is magic... because all you need are some fairies to take your pain away and help you sleep... you take a book to read... you take a pen and a paper to write...you cling on some music that might ...
People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard becaus...
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to re...
With fantasy, one often has to think of a well-loved series before narrowing the selection to a favourite book. So it is with Zelazny. I've read his 'Princes in Amber' books so often, I know them almost verbatim, so much so that I am now trying to fo...
When I started out, I didn't have any writing routine, I had a job. Writing was a hobby I indulged in over the weekends or in the evening when I wasn't too knackered, watching TV, reading a book, or up the pub. I only ever started counting words upon...
When I get started each day, I read through and correct the previous day's 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure, I try to simply stop and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you're goi...
You make me love books and the words inside them, because they talk about you. I know they do, they tell me that I love you, not as cliché as I write it, but in the warmest, deepest, calmest words I could ever read. I love you, like the books say it...
