The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: books, writing

Jeanette Winterson

It’s a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people–men and women alike–could go on to happier, more productive lives.

Jeanette Winterson

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

Here’s what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer’s heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said, ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.