"Dalam hidup kita, cuma satu yang kita punya, yaitu keberanian. Kalau tidak punya itu, lantas apa harga hidup kita ini?"
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer

"But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. "
— Dave Eggers

"(When asked: But you have a very open relationship with your fans.) Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers."
— Neil Gaiman

"a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast? "
— Jodi Picoult

"Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright. "
— Aaron Sorkin

"And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear."
— Paulo Coelho

"I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding."
— A.M. Homes

"It's not really a surprise we were known as the weaker sex, because you literally cannot get a breath. So it's sort of, as soon as you start getting emotional, if you're doing an emotional scne, you can't calm down. you can't literally draw a breath to try and center yourself again," she said. "It's no wonderful they were sort of fainting all over the place."
— Keira Knightley

""It's not really a surprise we were known as the weaker sex, because you literally cannot get a breath. So it's sort of, as soon as you start getting emotional, if you're doing an emotional scne, you can't calm down. you can't literally draw a breath to try and center yourself again," she said. "It's no wonderful they were sort of fainting all over the place.""
— Keira Knightley

"You're in love with what you do, or you're not in love"
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"I don't think real morality can ever be codified. You can't say, Thou shalt not, and you can't say Thou shalt. What you can say is that this is how people feel and why they feel the way they do."
— John Gardner

"There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.
I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is.
I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas."
— Kurt Vonnegut