Reading Writing Quotes

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

but the attitude reading and writing
gives you ~ Thylias Moss

Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation. ~ William Zinsser

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it ~ James Bryce

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are 'still' struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it bre ~ Terri Windling

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading. ~ Douglas Crockford

Write when you can't stop writing. Read when you stopped writing! ~ Robert Ahaness

Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn. ~ Jami Attenberg

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing
maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind. ~ Wendy Lesser

I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading. ~ James Paul Gee

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting. ~ Clive James

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry ~ William Empson

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. ~ Cyril Connolly

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,
his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth. ~ John Milton

We inhabit a world so inundated with composite pictorial-verbal forms [...] and with the technology for the rapid, cheap production of words and images that nature itself threatens to become what it was in the Middle Ages: an encyclopedic illuminated book overlaid with ornamentation and marginal glosses, every object converted into an image with its proper label or signature ~ W. J. T. Mitchell

Ho Kyuns poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Hos poetry strikes many parallels
the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle
and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading. ~ Sam Hamill

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book. ~ Groucho Marx

As both a musician and a former teacher, I feel that music is as important to kids as reading and writing. ~ Sheryl Crow

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit. ~ Alice Munro

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. ~ Andre Breton

One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional - it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story. ~ Angie Thomas

You will, I am sure, agree with me that ... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought. ~ Jacques Barzun

My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once. ~ Karl Kraus

A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology. ~ Roxane Gay

The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. 'They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring, ~ Oliver DeMille

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes. ~ Scarlett Thomas

Reading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read. ~ Frank Smith

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of. ~ S.A. Tawks

A Writer Drenched in Words is Never Caught in a Dry Spell ~ Anonymous

I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel. ~ Terry Pratchett

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. ~ Harold Bloom

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both. ~ Joseph Brodsky

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there. ~ Isabel Allende

We all love stories, even if they're not true. As we grow up, one of the ways we learn about the world is through the stories we hear. Some are about particular events and personalities within our personal circles of family and friends. Some are part of the larger cultures we belong to - the myths, fables, and fairy tales about our own ways of life that have captivated people for generations. In stories that are told often, the line between fact and myth can become so blurred that we easily mistake one for the other. This is true of a story that many people believe about education, even though it's not real and never really was. It goes like this: Young children go to elementary school mainly to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. These skills are essential so they can do well academically in high school. If they go on to higher education and graduate with a good degree, they'll find a well-paid job and the country will prosper too. ~ Ken Robinson

Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story. ~ John Green

I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French. ~ EL Seed

I enjoy reading for the sake of reading and my attitude about writing is the same. If a story line required it, I would absolutely write in another genre. ~ Alistair Cross

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass

Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading. ~ Marie Arana

My big dream was to write. I never thought about movie deals or book awards or bestseller lists. I still don't. All I've ever wanted from this gig is to sell enough books to allow me to keep writing more of them. ~ Alistair Cross

I write because I'm free,
because I can,
because I will.
I write because I must,
because I'm breathing,
because I'd go crazy otherwise,
because it's who I am.
I write to make a statement,
to share my thoughts,
to discover myself,
to express my ideas.
But most of all, I write for future generations.
I write for love.
I write to inspire.
I write to encourage.
I write for me. ~ Nadege Richards

In London, there is a section in a newspaper, the Metro, where people write in and thank strangers for their lovely or kind actions throughout the week. It brings me such happiness reading it and makes me know that, ultimately, human beings are amazing. ~ Rosie Fellner

I thought, maybe the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing. I made up my mind I would know my letters. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune

In the beginning, I want to say something about human greatness. Some time ago, I was reading texts of Kungtse. When I read these texts, I understood something about human greatness. What I understood from his writings was: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else. Everything else that deviates higher or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this, we can develop a deep respect for every human being. ~ Bert Hellinger

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month, than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men. ~ George Whitefield

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from. ~ Ronnie Montrose

Reading non-fiction without writing notes is like chewing without swallowing. You will get the taste of it but digest nothing ~ Ray Hartley

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one ... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money ... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it. ~ James Clavell

The paper is patient, but the reader is not. ~ Joseph Joubert

One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there. ~ Christine Jennings

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. ~ Ezra Pound

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry. ~ Ian Rankin

We ought to read mainly, not to know more, but to remind ourselves that we do not know much. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Don't just read to read. Read to understand. ~ Jill Telford

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. ~ Mary Oliver

I had never understood quite so clearly the effective power of Jane Jacob's writing - no, her clear-headed observation - as I did reading "What We See". Maybe that's really the point of writing. That if you take the time to look, to really observe, then you see what is happening, and, with the clarity of that vision, you can act to save neighborhoods. ~ Nancy Milford

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write. ~ Roy Peter Clark

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing. ~ Brandon Sanderson

It feels great to read but greater to write. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it. ~ Margaret Mahy

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant ... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which ... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills
the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times ~ Timothy VanSlyke

Never write on a subject without first having read yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself hungry on it. ~ Jean Paul

[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use. ~ John Green

Poetry is a connection to a change within you. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market. ~ John Taylor Gatto

But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

There is more to literacy than 'reading' and 'writing'. ~ Strive Masiyiwa

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. ~ Arthur Golden

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more. ~ Robert Stone

I have been, earlier in my life, a lazy writer. I'd spend three hours at the gym to avoid writing, or I'd just find other distractions - reading, doing laundry, talking on the phone, etc. But suddenly I was like a laser beam: I was relentlessly focused, sometimes to the detriment of other things. ~ Emily Susan Rapp

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. ~ Francine Prose

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story. ~ Willa Cather

For I aint, you must know,' said Betty, 'much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. ~ Charles Dickens

I love pop culture
the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that.
That's why I said I don't like elitism. ~ Haruki Murakami

There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry ... ~ Brandon Sanderson

Being a successful student is about more than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's about being a skilled negotiator, a keen observer, and a master planner. ~ Stefanie Weisman

I learned that not only had he never been in a relationship, he had also never came out publicly as a gay man. But in a way, he'd had no reason to do so- he hadn't had sex in three-and-a-half decades, he told me. At first, I did not believe him; such a monk like existence- devoted solely to work, reading, writing, thinking- seemed at once awe-inspiring and inconceivable. He was without a doubt the most unusual person I had ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him. ~ Bill Hayes

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained. ~ Toni Morrison

There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified.
They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along. ~ James Ellroy

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. ~ Francis Bacon

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody. ~ Isabel Allende

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city's underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It's long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That's what we're after, isn't it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel's length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains? ~ Ander Monson

He does not write at all whose poems no man reads ~ Marcus Aurelius

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. ~ Oscar Wilde

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations. ~ James Cameron

I can never tell what's going to end up being on an album until it's all finished. I'm reading the news everyday, and sometimes I just have to be away from it. And that ends up writing the songs for me a little bit. ~ Jack Johnson

When reading I pretend I'm an editor, though when writing I realize I'm not. ~ Fierce Dolan

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life. ~ Marcus Aurelius

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God's sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football m ~ Roberto Bolano

I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of hero for someone like me, committed to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of my craft as well as to the technical ones, but a hero and strong influence she remains nonetheless.

Source: Her blog. ~ Terri Windling

We have a reading, a talking, and a writing public. When shall we have a thinking? ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington