#book

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#books #books-express #sex #sexuality #winterson

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#expectations #open-mindedness #preconceptions #reading #biography

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS, ↗

— John Green

#books #fiction #highlighter #reading-readers-writers #writing

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fame #immortality #unfinished-works #writing #literary-criticism

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment. ↗

— Stephen King

#instruction-book #memoir #on-writing #writing-craft

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short. ↗

— Jane Austen

#craft #enjoyment #entertainment #writing #writing-craft

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#good-books #great-writing #reading #writing-books

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#creativity #writers #writing #writers-block

I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth? ↗

— John Waters

#writing-books

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise. ↗

— Richard Brautigan

#writing-books