~READING & WRITING~

READING

"It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say." ~Sholem Asch

"Wear the old coat and buy the new book." ~Austin Phelps

"I am part of all I have read." ~John Kieran

"What does the soul find so recuperative about reading fairy-tales? When I am tired of everything and 'full of days', fairy-tales are for me always the refreshing bath that proves so beneficial. There all earthly, all finite cares vanish; you, yes sorrow even, are infinite." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"The covers of this book are too far apart." ~Ambrose Bierce

"When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life." ~Christopher Morley

"If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read." ~Japanese Proverb

"When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before." ~Cliff Fadiman

"I cannot live without books." ~Thomas Jefferson

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." ~Thomas Carlyle

WRITING

"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two." ~Larry McMurtry

"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure." ~Henry David Thoreau

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
  Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
  That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think." ~Lord Byron

"Writing a book is an adventure: to begin with it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant; and the last phase is just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude--you kill the monster and fling him to the public." ~Winston Churchill

"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease." ~Charles Caleb Colton

"Beyond anything, I think, a writer is someone entranced by the power of language to create a magic show of the imagination, to make the dead sit up and talk, to shine light into the darkness of the great human mysteries." ~Tim O'Brien, The Magic Show

"I most also believe that writing is essentially an act of faith. Faith in the heuristic power of the imagination. Faith in the fertility of dream. Faith that as writers we might discover that which cannot be known through empirical menas. (The notions of right and wrong, for instance. Good and evil. Ugliness and beauty.) Faith in story itself. Faith that a story will lead, in some way, to epiphany or understanding or enlightenment." ~Tim O'Brien, The Magic Show

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~E. L. Doctorow

"In our time book-scribbling is so wretched and people write about things they have never really given thought to, let alone experienced. So I've decided to read only the writings of those who were executed or faced danger in some other way." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"Nowadays the more contemptible a writer the better his earnings." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"The spirit sometimes ventures too far ahead; the thing then is to grab it in a hurry, enclose it in a coffin and put it on paper, to throw oneself upon it as if it were a felled quarry, bind it, imprison it, deprive it of its element, with cunning, with might, forcibly--it resists--unsparing treatment is permitted. Into secure boxes, books, with it!" ~Soren Kierkegaard

"The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything." ~Walter Bagehot

"Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls." ~Thomas Carlyle, Ibid

"It is my view that good storytelling involves, in a substantive sense, a plunge into mystery of the grandest order." ~Tim O'Brien, The Magic Show

"The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's own heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself." ~Tim O'Brien, The Magic Show

"A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking." ~Arthur Block

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

GRAMMAR, SPELLING, PUNCTUATION, ETC...

"Abstract, grammatical punctuation just isn't good enough when it comes to rhetorical writing, particularly when spiced with irony, epigram, subtlety and, in the ideal sense, malice, etc." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"A synonym is the word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." ~Burt Bacharach

"You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count." ~Winnie The Pooh (Rabbit)

"My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling, but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places." Winnie The Pooh (Pooh)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author." ~Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written." ~unknown

"Asking a writer about critics is like asking a lamp post about dogs." ~Graham Beattie

"Eventually everything is turned upside down. People no longer write for someone to learn something. Perish the thought, what disrespect! the reading public knows everything already. It isn't the reader that needs the author (as the patient the doctor); no, it's the author who needs the reader." ~Soren Kierkegaard

POETRY

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." ~ Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

"A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility." ~Thomas Carlyle, Ibid

"Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life." ~Josephine Hart