There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, "He's a very literate person," what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, has a certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about various subjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writing text. But we're seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge and communicate, through sound and pictures.
There is more to literacy than 'reading' and 'writing'.
…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.
There are companies like Facebook that wield tremendous power over how Americans understand the world. Do they have a social responsibility now? That's the question we're only beginning to ask. Literature still has this power to do things that other forms of media don't have. The process of reading and writing and having arguments about ideas is valuable. I'm afraid it's something we're losing.
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.
I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.
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