Kris's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 77)

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: books, children, difficult, grown-ups, write, writers, writing
3,045 people liked it

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: art, truth
82 people liked it

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Many Waters)

tags: belief
65 people liked it

"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: understanding
53 people liked it

"Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: work
44 people liked it

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

tags: inspirational, stories, writing
2,700 people liked it

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

tags: reading, writing
937 people liked it

"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 (The Catcher in the Rye)

tags: authors, books, literature, reading, writing
895 people liked it

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams

tags: craft, humor, writing
598 people liked it

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: freedom, women, writing
427 people liked it

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing
394 people liked it

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
331 people liked it

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

tags: television, writing
229 people liked it

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

tags: writing
217 people liked it

"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. "
— Joss Whedon

tags: writing
137 people liked it

"The first draft of anything is shit."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: writing
134 people liked it

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
130 people liked it

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

tags: writing
120 people liked it

"The scariest moment is always just before you start."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

tags: writing
105 people liked it

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

tags: writing
95 people liked it

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

tags: life, perfectionism, writing
70 people liked it

"A word after a word after a word is power."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: reading, writing
66 people liked it

"Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open."
— Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within)

tags: soul, writing
60 people liked it

"I want to do something splendid…
Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead…
I think I shall write books."
— Louisa May Alcott

tags: books, writing
60 people liked it

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

tags: inspirational, life, writing
57 people liked it

"Write about the emotions you fear the most."
— Laurie Halse Anderson

61 people liked it

"I'm just going to write because I cannot help it."
— Charlotte Brontë

53 people liked it

"Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

tags: author, inspirational
47 people liked it

"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. "
— Agatha Christie

tags: writing
39 people liked it

"All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once...Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now."
— Joss Whedon

41 people liked it

"Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing."
— William Faulkner

31 people liked it

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

39 people liked it

"Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE."
— Joss Whedon

tags: humor, inspirational
33 people liked it

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: reading
3,048 people liked it

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

tags: animals, books, dogs, friends, humor
6,680 people liked it

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

tags: literacy
6,123 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,686 people liked it

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
— Albert Einstein

2,521 people liked it

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,311 people liked it

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

tags: books, reading
2,108 people liked it

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

tags: books, library, reading
1,458 people liked it

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

tags: culture, reading
1,320 people liked it

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

tags: books, writing
1,120 people liked it

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

tags: books, children
1,025 people liked it

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

tags: books, inspirational, life, reading
943 people liked it

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
— Paul Sweeney

1,002 people liked it

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

tags: books, reading
766 people liked it

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

tags: books, journey, reading, travel
663 people liked it

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
— William Styron

tags: books, reading
615 people liked it

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
— James Baldwin

tags: books, empathy, pain, reading
545 people liked it

« previous 1 2 next »

Kris's profile »

all quotes
add a quote

Kris's quotes

tags from Kris's quotes