Books and Writing

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), writer

You can approach the art of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair... Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies

The paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock

Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), writer

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), lexicographer

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
Andre Maurois

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau, author/philosopher

You become a writer by writing. It is a yoga.
R.K. Narayan (1906-2001), novelist

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.
Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849)

Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of him.
Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773), statesman and writer

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written.
Oscar Wilde

No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), critic

No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61), poet

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
e.e. cummings

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Henry Ward Beecher

A poem... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.
Robert Frost