“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”— Marcel Proust, amazon.com
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them … And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.”— David Foster Wallace, medium.com
“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 s…”— Carl Sagan, amazon.com
“Edgar Allen Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman 'the most poetical topic in the world' and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives.”— Jessica Valenti, amazon.com
“A writer who turns a phrase beautifully can turn me on, as can someone who makes me laugh.”— Roxane Gay, instyle.com
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”— E. L. Doctorow, en.wikiquote.org
“I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is, it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.”— Alfred Hitchcock, edition.cnn.com
“Good fiction is written by people who’ve read a lot of fiction. If you want to be a writer, read a lot, and as broadly as possible.”— William Gibson, ideas.ted.com
“Ideas are a huge, huge blessing. That’s the thing you try to catch – an idea that you fall in love with.”— David Lynch, the-talks.com
“We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we’ve forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That’s why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.”— Tom Robbins, amazon.com
“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.”— Markus Zusak, amazon.com
“Here's a brutal truth: Career novelists aren't the most talented writers. They're adequately talented writers who finish what they start.”— Maggie Stiefvater, twitter.com
“Writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other people's lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from scraps.”— Garrison Keillor, amazon.com
“It's true: pain and suffering helps to create what we call art. given the choice I'd never choose this damned pain and suffering for myself but somehow it finds me as the royalties continue to roll on in.”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com