We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects ever...
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying ...
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer br...
He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friend...
I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was little ...
Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will...
I looked at my friend. I don’t know what I had done to deserve her friendship but she was always there for me. She was there before my whole world came crashing down, she was there after, and she would be there ‘til they laid us both in the groun...
I often say never write about white people. Not many people realize what I mean by this. Its pretty simple. Some may think its unrealistic to have an ethnically diverse cast but its ten times more unrealistic to see a cast of only white people. Like ...
Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt ...
I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discov...
I was shocked to read that Lord Ferrers, a Home Office minister, when booked for speeding and presented with a £40 fixed penalty with three penalty points, them wrote to the Suffolk police to thank them for catching him. There is a sickness in Engla...
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in...
There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book takes the reader into a new world of experience; it is a...
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing...
And although this (marital love) cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it. ...
Freud could never be certain, he said, in view of his wide and early reading, whether what seemed like a new creation might not be the work instead of hidden channels of memory leading back to the notions of others absorbed, coming now an...
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pri...
I’d say that most of these [poems in Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP] are just straightforward enough, but not entirely explainable or attributable to a single cause/effect, which makes them the kind of poems I want to read many times… “Salt...
I'm leaning against the bookshelves when it occurs to me that one thing here is real-the books. I reach behind me and let my fingers trail over the rough leather of their antique spines, then pull one free. Nobody here reads them; the books are for d...
I withdrew a small card from the pouch. The front of it was filled with lines of elegant, hand-lettered script. "What does it say?" Dad asked, leaning forward. "The Four Remembers of Life," I read. "Number one: Remember, you are unique. Number two: R...
You can be a member of all of the romance writers associations, take part in all of the networking available, or win the latest romance award... but guess what? None of that makes a difference if you don't WRITE something people want to READ. The gre...
