"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
— Victor Hugo

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

"What an author doesn't know could fill a book."
— Holly Black (Lucinda's Secret)

"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."
— Dorothy Parker

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."
— Emily Dickinson

"Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it."
— Michael Crichton

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."
— Vladmir Nabokov

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
— Mark Twain

"Don't you know no one can escape
the power of creatures reaching out
with breath alone?"
— Marina Tsvetaeva

"There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there."
— Pamela Ribon

"Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in manner. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."
— Oscar Wilde

"Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!"
— Lillian Cauldwell

"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
— Dave Barry

"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. "
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"Give a poet a pen"
— A. Jarrell Hayes

"We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth."
— John Hodgman

"This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period."
— Leon Uris

"It's nice to be important but it's important to be nice."
— Shamik Shah

"Good authors worry about genres great authors don't."
— Frank Gaspar

"It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. "
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

"Life's adventures make great reading!"
— Denise Robbins

"AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest."
— Christopher Seufert

"The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Determine the result you desire..law of averages does not know the objective untill the decision is made. Once a decision is made, the law of averages goes into operation."
— Earl Prevette (How to Turn Your Ability Into Cash)

""But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work." "
— Gloria Whelan

"Only so much of life do I know as I have lived. "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

""a candle loses nothing from lighting another candle""
— Kerry Day

"What's causin' all this?"
— Ric Flair

"I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. "
— Tara Bray Smith

"In its annual Best of Issue, readers voted me BEST AUTHOR of Pasadena in the annual Best of Issue in the Pasadena Weekly!!"
— Andre Coleman

"Readers voted me BEST AUTHOR of Pasadena in the annual Best of Issue in the Pasadena Weekly!!"
— Andre Coleman

""Ponder well on this point: the pleasant hours of our life are all connected by a more or less tangible link, with some memory of the table."
"
— Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-1888)

"ALWAYS KEEP YOUR DREAMS ALIVE"
— Patricia J Smith