M > M's Quotes

“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 is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”
― Mark Twain

“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.”
― William Faulkner

“Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

“Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“When all is said and done, more is said than done.”
― Lou Holtz

“You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.”
― Lou Holtz

“The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.”
― adam johnson

“She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.”
― May Sinclair

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
― Joseph Addison

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox.
'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body?

“A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

“Mma Ramotswe sighed. 'We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.'

That is true,' said Mma Potokwane sadly. 'There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

“It's easy to believe in something when you win all the time...The losses are what define a man's faith.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“I can't abide people who go soft over animals and then cheat every human they come across!”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air

“You've no right to walk into people's castles and take their guitars.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“Words are important to me. I listen to each one, weigh and measure it. If I cannot trust your words, how can I trust you?”
― Julie Klassen, The Girl in the Gatehouse

“This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.”
― Diana Wynne Jones

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“All these things that crib and cab in your brain, in your imagination, are in fact things that might well in later life drive you insane.”
― Diana Wynne Jones

“Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.”
― Melissa Senate

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир