Sarah Sanborn > Sarah's Quotes

“Fear cuts deeper than swords.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. 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. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.”
― Philip Pullman

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“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

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Voltaire

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I will write in words of fire.
I will write them on your skin.
I will write about desire.
Write beginnings, write of sin.
You’re the book I love the best,
your skin only holds my truth,
you will be a palimpsest
lines of age rewriting youth.
You will not burn upon the pyre.
Or be buried on the shelf.
You’re my letter to desire:
And you’ll never read yourself.
I will trace each word and comma
As the final dusk descends,
You’re my tale of dreams and drama,
Let us find out how it ends.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism."

[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]”
― Neil Gaiman

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War