"I write for the same reason I breathe; because if I didn't I would die." --Isaac Asimov

"There's nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." --Walter Wellesley Smith

"Never own more than you can carry at a dead run, except for books. Books are worth taking risks for." --Kage Baker

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word." --Catherine Drinker Bowen

"I don't wait to be struck by lightning and don't need certain slants of light in order to write." --Toni Morrison

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word... is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug." --Mark Twain

"The writing gods decided to stop by. And you try and be there when the muse decides she wants to hang out with you." --Tori Amos

"Writing is spending a long time in silence, by myself, and covering up the work when anyone comes in the room so they can't see it." --Philip Pullman

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." --Tom Clancy

"The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium." --Norbert Platt

"The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that cannot read them." --Mark Twain

"He who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of god... slays an immortality." --John Milton

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." --Herman Melville

"Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it." --Lloyd Alexander

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll

"I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." --Douglas Adams

"He has a bookcase in his apartment. An empty bookcase. I don't understand... How can someone be an adult and have an empty bookcake?" -Amy Gray, Judging Amy, ep 2x19 "Between the Wanting and the Getting"

"But you read a lot of books, I'm thinking. Hard to have faith, ain't it, when you've read too many books." --Terry Pratchett

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." --Aldous Huxley

"Dullard: someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book." --Philip Jose Farmer

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot." --Neil Gaiman

"Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death." --William Blake

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." --Samuel Johnson

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword."
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages." --Elaine Line

"Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing." --Heather Armstrong

"A good bookshop is just a genteel black hole that knows how to read." --Terry Pratchett

"I am a galley slave to pen and ink." --Honore de Balzac

"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul." --Goethe

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money." --Jules Renard

"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it." --Leo Rosten

"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to." --W. Somerset Maugham

"Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It's the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colours." --Rhys Alexander

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." --Stephen King

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." --Ray Bradbury

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." --Charles Peguy

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." --William Wordsworth

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible." --Vladimir Nabakov

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." --Anton Chekhov

"A page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle." --John Cheever

"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous." --Henry Brooks Adams

"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." --Lord Byron

"A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head." --Ethel Wilson

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake." --E.L. Doctorow

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you." --Arthur Polotnik

"Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free." --Samuel Johnson

"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."
--Alexander Pope

"It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write." --Sinclair Lewis

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself." --Franz Kafka

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." --Gustave Flaubert

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes." --André Gide

"It seemed to me that I had undertaken too lofty a theme for my powers, so much so that I was afraid to enter upon it; and so I remained for several days desiring to write and afraid to begin." --Dante Alighieri

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant." --Edna Ferber

"Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." --George Orwell

"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment." --Hart Crane

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write." --Rainer Maria Rilke

"Every word written is a victory against death." --Michel Butor

"It's alive, it's alive, whereas expository writing is the writer writing." --William Gaddis
(On his preference for long passages of uninterrupted dialogue.)

"Neither man nor god is going to tell me what to write." --James T. Farrell

"There are many reasons why novelists write... but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world." --John Fowles

"Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer." --Susan Sontag

"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?" --William Gaddis

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." --Gloria Steinem

"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words... the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered." --J. Michael Straczynski

"I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead on after another." --Brenda Ueland

"I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down." --Kaari Utrio

"Once one gets a theme in one's mind it becomes obsessive. If it happens to be forgery, then everywhere you look all you see is forgery, falsification—of religious values, of art—plagiarism, stealing. Gradually this panorama emerged. I thought, 'I've got to get it all in here.'" --William Gaddis

"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognised anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer? And if so, why?!" --Bennett Cerf

"The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with." --William Faulkner

"Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter." --Jessamyn West

"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing." --Eugene Ionesco

"Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing." --Ursula K. LeGuin

"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer." --Stephen Leigh

"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." --Samuel Lover

"One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating." --Niyi Osundare

"Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up." --Jane Yolen

"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money." --J. P. Donleavy

"In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy." --Albert Einstein

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." --Ernest Hemingway

"And if I have to be a thieving, immoral crow in order to write a book, then by God, I'll grow black feathers on my ass and croak as loud as I can." --Pasi Jääskeläinen

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." --Jack London

"Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know'." --Wislawa Szymborska

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." --Oscar Wilde

"Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing." --Neil Gaiman

"First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him." --Ray Bradbury

"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does." --William Faulkner

"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible." --Mark Twain

"Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language." --Hilma Wolitzer

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." --Kingsley Amis

"Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." --Michael Crichton

"Friends who are not writers try to be sympathetic and understanding of a writer's mood, but, truly, it takes one to know one." --Lynn Abbey

"We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that." --Kevin J. Anderson

"Great writers are the saints for the godless." --Anita Brookner

"Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual." --Rita Mae Brown

"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down." --Edna St. Vincent Millay

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it." --Ernest Hemingway

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads." --William Styron

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

"A novelist at work hears many voices in her head." --Rebecca Goldstein

"Language was the first mood-altering substance." --Dylan Evans

"Again, what is my object precisely in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them down on paper? Quite so; but yet it is more imposing on paper ... Besides, I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow ... For some reason I believe that if I write it down I should get rid of it. Why not try?" -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
--Arnold Lobel


"Throw up into the typewriter every morning and clean up every afternoon." --Ray Bradbury (on how to write)

"The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter." --Marcel Proust

"All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order." --Emma Darcy

"The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet." --Mary Higgins Clark

"It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." --Shirley Hazzard

"Creativity is seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and in that way be a playmate of god." --Michele Shea

"Every great creative act since the initial one has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos." --John Gardner

"This is the true joy of life: being used up for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." --George Bernard Shaw

"If a story is in you, it has got to come out." --William Faulkner

"We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone - this is not our choice. The urge is to create." --Sophy Burnham

"Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them." --Allan Gurganus

"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live." --Francoise Sagan

"I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing." --Octavia Butler

"Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material." --W. Sommerset Maugham

"I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk." --Mignon Eberhart

"The writer's duty is to keep on writing." --William Styron

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long." --Leonard S. Bernstein

"[Writing is] like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." --E.L. Doctorow

"You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing." --Doris Lessing

"The rule 'ending a sentence with a preposition' is something up with which I will not put." --Winston Churchill

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." --E. L. Doctorow

"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different." --Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

"Even the most productive writers are expert dawdlers." --Donald M. Murray

"A writer is working when he's staring out the window." --Burton Rascoe

"I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean." --Dorothy West

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." --Rudyard Kipling

"Not long ago, a writer friend, sunk in apathy and despair, came to visit. 'What is it about writing?' he asked, striking his forehead with the flat of his hand. 'Why is it so awful? It's no way to live! Why do we do it?' And then he leapt to his feet to walk unhappily around his chair. 'Look at writers. I don't know a single writer who doesn't hate his work. Writers hate writing. They're always talking about how hard it is. Artists don't hate painting. You never hear an artist talking about how much he hates his work. Sculptors don't complain all the time about how hard they find sculpting. But writers! A few weeks later I had occasion to ask an artist if she agreed. Do artists hate their work? She looked at me, amused. 'You're forgetting something,' she said. 'Writing is so powerful. People rarely look at a painting and weep." --Sophy Burnham

"Write as if you are dying." --Annie Dillard

"How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?" --Ray Bradbury

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." --Robert Frost

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." --Claude M. Bristol

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." --F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium." --John Steinbeck

"Finding the courage to write does not involve erasing or 'conquering' one's fears. Working writers aren't those who have eliminated their anxiety. They are the ones who keep scribbling while their heart races and their stomach churns, and who mail manuscripts with trembling fingers. The key difference between writers who are paralyzed by fear and those who are merely terrified is that the latter come to terms with their anxieties. They learn how to keep writing even as fear tries to yank their hand from the page. They find the courage to write." --Ralph Keyes

"But who shall be the master; the writer or the reader?" --Denis Diderot

"Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings." --Heinrich Heine

"The pen is the tongue of the mind." --Miguel de Cervantes

"All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words."
--Amy Lowell

"Read in order to live." --Gustave Flaubert

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read." --Oscar Wilde

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty." --Theodore Parker

"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books." --William Ellery Channing

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker." --Gwendolen Brooks

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." --Logan Pearsall Smith

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." --Jorge Luis Borges

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books." --Albert Camus

"For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives."
--Amy Lowell

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books." --Ann Richards

"Books are the carriers of civilisation. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." --Barbara Tuchman

"I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals." --Denise Levertov

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." --Elizabeth Drew

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." --Elizabeth Hardwick

"Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare." --Harriet Martineau

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum -- of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold." --Henry Miller

"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house." --Henry Ward Beecher

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." --Katharine Mansfield

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier." --Kathleen Norris

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." --Louisa May Alcott

"A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body." --Margaret Fuller

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself." --Mark Twain

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." --Mark Twain

"In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." --Mortimer Adler

"Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were our demigods." --Nick Bantock

"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas... A place where history comes to life." --Norman Cousins

"You fail only if you stop writing." --Ray Bradbury

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." --Cicero

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." --Ray Bradbury

"Writing is a marathon of the spirit. Don't give up." --Stuart Cohen

"Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that." --Rick Moody

"The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality." --Rick Moody

"Literature precedes genre." --Rick Moody

"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die." --Isaac Asimov

"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." --Isaac Asimov

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it." --Neil Gaiman

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them." --Charles Caleb Colton

"The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally." --Gary Gygax

"All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words."
--Amy Lowell

"For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives."
-- Amy Lowell

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books." --Albert Camus

"I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books." --Ann Richards

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." --Barbara Tuchman

"There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." --Bertrand Russell

"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause." --Mark Twain

"A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you." --Daniel J. Boorstein

"I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is, after all, made up of millions of individuals." --Denise Levertov

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." --Elizabeth Drew

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." --Elizabeth Hardwick

"There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away."
--Emily Dickinson

"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum - of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend; it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold." --Henry Miller

"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house." --Henry Ward Beecher

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." --Katharine Mansfield

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier." --Kathleen Norris

"A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body." --Margaret Fuller

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself." --Mark Twain

"Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were our demigods." --Nick Bantock

"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life." --Norman Cousins

"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satelite instead of a system." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader." --Joseph Joubert

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty." --Theodore Parker

"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours." --William Ellery Channing

"Books are a narcotic." --Franz Kafka

"Books are a uniquely portable magic." --Stephen King

"Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence." --Jan Morris

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." --Desiderius Erasmus

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." --Marcus Tullius Cicero

Writer - 1) a masochist with an ink and paper fetish; 2) a damaged creative individual who when confronted with life's unpleasantries retreats to put it all down in words rather than fight like a girl; 3) someone who never forgets anything and will eventually write it in book form; 4) a demented, thin, sad creature in hock up to their neck who truly believes publication will solve all their problems; 5) Peter Pan one step up on the evolutionary ladder.
--The Devil's Publishing Dictionary