Literature Quotes

"I write to give a voice to the voiceless."

"The unsaid is often more powerful than the spoken word."

"I write to find answers to questions I didn't even know I had."

"To me, the most important thing is the story, the characters, and the emotion."

"Life is a melody that we write as we go."

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."

"I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful."

"A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run."

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

"I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all."

"I don't read the critics."

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."

"If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters."

"When I love a book, I really love a book. You don't get that very often."

"Every great story seems to begin with a snake."

"Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays."

"Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story."

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools."

"I have read your book and much like it."

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it."

"If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."

"'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself."

"In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past."

"Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death."

"The Son of God took our nature, and in it took upon himself to teach us by both word and example even to the point of death, thus binding us to himself through love."

"I write contemporary rock with Jane's. And I also write house music with people like Kascade."

"I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell."

"I like to write about things about which I have no answers, questions that trouble me. These things trouble me."

"'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once."

"If he is a ghost, then it's very disappointing for me, because he is banished in the story, and that could mean that he won't be coming back, and that would be terrible, wouldn't it?"

"I used to write a lot of songs. I was an English major in college. I was a deluded poet for a year. Totally deluded."

"From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself."

"LORD ILLINGWORTH: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. MRS. ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations."

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,  By each let this be heard, Some do it with abitter look,  Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss,  The brave man with a sword!"

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read."

"I've never been much of a guitarist. I mean, I've played forever, but I was always more of a rhythm kind of guy. I don't read music."

"My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer."

"The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism."

"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech."

"There is a generation of skimmers. It's not that they don't want to read in-depth content, but they want to evaluate what the content is before they commit time. Especially on a mobile phone - you don't have the phone, or cellular data, or screen size to be reading full-length content."

"I was using Twitter a lot on my phone, and was realising there was a massive gap between the link on the tweet and the full story. If you could come up with a summary layer to show in Twitter, that would be awesome."

"I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels."

"E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop."

"I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again."

"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction."

"As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there."

"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

"I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing."

"Terrorists are not following Islam. Killing people and blowing up people and dropping bombs in places and all this is not the way to spread the word of Islam. So people realize now that all Muslims are not terrorists."

"The word 'Islam' means 'peace.' The word 'Muslim' means 'one who surrenders to God.' But the press makes us seem like haters."