David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice." Diana Gabaldon
"Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades." Diana Gabaldon
"I didn't want to tell the story of what makes two people come together, although that's a theme of great power and universality. I wanted to find out what it takes for two people to stay together for fifty years—or more. I wanted to tell not the story of courtship, but the story of marriage." Diana Gabaldon
"I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line." Diana Gabaldon
"I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper—which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually." Diana Gabaldon
"I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading." Diana Gabaldon
"I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence." Diana Gabaldon
"I work on multiple projects at a time because it keeps me from getting writer's block." Diana Gabaldon
"People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different." Diana Gabaldon
"The most irritating thing about cliches, I decided, was how frequently they were true." Diana Gabaldon
"Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three." Diana Gabaldon
"When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere." Diana Gabaldon
"You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it." Diana Gabaldon
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins." Neil Gaiman
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard." Neil Gaiman
"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
"Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour." Neil Gaiman
"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning." Neil Gaiman
"I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book." Neil Gaiman
"All the ordinary, decent-hearted reader will ask is that the transformation be astonishing and interesting and that the story in some way appear to make sense…" John Gardner
"As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night." John Gardner
"As every writer knows… there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another… Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect." John Gardner
"Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound." John Gardner
"I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of—serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive." John Gardner
"If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living." John Gardner
"Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer." John Gardner
"Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind." John Gardner
"Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know." John Gardner
"One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time." John Gardner
"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself." John Gardner
"Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another." John Gardner
"The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse." John Gardner
"The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot." John Gardner
"The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers." John Gardner
"The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers." John Gardner
"The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs." John Gardner
"The trick, of course, is to find a profession you like and one that will also feed your writing, and not eat up all your time." John Gardner
"The writer is more servant than master of his story." John Gardner
"We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images." John Gardner
"Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out." John Gardner
"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order." Jean-Luc Godard
"As soon as we associate reading with a test, we've missed the point." Seth Godin
"Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map." Seth Godin
"How can I create something that critics will criticize?" Seth Godin
"I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing." Seth Godin
"I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first." Seth Godin
"If you are willing to do something that might not work, you're closer to being an artist." Seth Godin
"If you're going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons." Seth Godin
"It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up." Seth Godin
"Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on." Seth Godin
"One day, I'd like to write a book about the worst ads ever run, but my fear is that it would be too long." Seth Godin
"Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires." Seth Godin
"Ten times as much polishing is definitely not ten times as good. Whether you're polishing a piece of furniture or an idea, the benefits diminish quickly. The polishing turns into stalling." Seth Godin
"The best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now." Seth Godin
"The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want." Seth Godin
"The minute there's a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity." Seth Godin
"When your art fails, make better art." Seth Godin
"Write like you talk. Often." Seth Godin
"Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one." Seth Godin
"Your story is a symphony, not a note." Seth Godin
"One of the easiest things in the world is not to write… If it were easy, everyone would do it." William Goldman
"A good writer is not someone who knows how to write, but how to rewrite." William Goldman
"You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death." William Goldman
"It's an accepted fact that all writers are crazy, even the normal ones are weird." William Goldman
"When I was your age, television was called books." William Goldman
"One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print." William Goldman
"A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad." Samuel Goldwyn
"The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying." Samuel Goldwyn
"All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued." Nadine Gordimer
"As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence." Nadine Gordimer
"Books don't need batteries." Nadine Gordimer
"From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters." Nadine Gordimer
"I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that." Nadine Gordimer
"In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject—his subject being the consciousness of his own era." Nadine Gordimer
"It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have." Nadine Gordimer
"Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction." Nadine Gordimer
"Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views." Nadine Gordimer
"The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch." Nadine Gordimer
"What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else." Nadine Gordimer
"Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope." Nadine Gordimer
"Writing is always a voyage of discovery." Nadine Gordimer
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area." Nadine Gordimer
"Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature." Nadine Gordimer
"Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place—a single book written from different stages of your ability." Nadine Gordimer
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one." Baltasar Gracian
"There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one." Baltasar Gracian
"Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way." Baltasar Gracian
"Any mystery writer is both magician and moralist… two species of artist in short supply." Sue Grafton
"Give yourself time to get better." Sue Grafton
"I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path." Sue Grafton
"I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part." Sue Grafton
"I focus on the writing and let the rest of the process take care of itself. I've learned to trust my own instincts and I've also learned to take risks." Sue Grafton
"I only get writer's block about once a day." Sue Grafton
"I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point." Sue Grafton
"I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form." Sue Grafton
"I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since." Sue Grafton
"I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day." Sue Grafton
"My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise." Sue Grafton
"My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it." Sue Grafton
"My primary lesson, however, was that I'm a solo writer, happiest when I'm making all the executive decisions. I've always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits." Sue Grafton
"My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse." Sue Grafton
"Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day… and rightly so." Sue Grafton
"School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page." Sue Grafton
"Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back." Sue Grafton
"The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete." Sue Grafton
"Train yourself to listen to that small voice that tells us what's important and what's not." Sue Grafton
"Writing is a process and you must trust the process! Fear and anxiety are part of that process along with the enthusaism and the good days and the joy and the passion and the great hopes you have for a book. But when you run into problems, when you get stuck or scared, you must trust that that is part of how a book comes to pass, and what you need to do is get very still and quiet because Self will tell you how to get out of a hole you've dug for yourself." Sue Grafton
"Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear." Sue Grafton
"Writing is self-taught. Consulting other people only teaches you to depend on their reactions, which may or may not be legitimate. Quit looking for approval … Learn to evaluate your own work with a dispassionate eye… the lessons you acquire will be all the more valuable because you've mastered your craft from within." Sue Grafton
"You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories." Sue Grafton
"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit." Graham Greene
"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction." Graham Greene
"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." Graham Greene
"All good novelists have bad memories." Graham Greene
"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane." Graham Greene
"One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books." Graham Greene
"Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?" Graham Greene
"People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations." Graham Greene
"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn." Graham Greene
"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties." Graham Greene
"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him." Graham Greene
"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation." Graham Greene
"My eyes hunger to read more books then time allows me to devour." G.K. Griswold
"One two, one two,
Type a word or two.
Arrow left, arrow right,
Keep those fingers nice and tight.
Keys up, Keys down,
Move those digits all around.
One two, one two,
Type a word or two." G.K. Griswold
"As a child my family's menu consisted of two choices; take it or leave it." Buddy Hackett
"Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer." Arthur Hailey
"I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life." Arthur Hailey
"I set myself 600 words a day as a minimum output, regardless of the weather, my state of mind or if I'm sick or well. There must be 600 finished words-not almost right words." Arthur Hailey
"When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before." Arthur Hailey
"As a general rule, writing is very inconvenient." Shannon Hale
"Being a writer is a good, good thing." Shannon Hale
"But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?" Shannon Hale
"Even stories need a chance to sleep." Shannon Hale
"I am not sure I am ready to know what I think about that, so I dare not write it out." Shannon Hale
"I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for." Shannon Hale
"I cannot write to anyone outside myself—if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please." Shannon Hale
"I despise rushing headlong into a mystery. Much more satisfying to dip in a toe, test the waters, ease in slowly before we start to swim." Shannon Hale
"I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." Shannon Hale
"If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it." Shannon Hale
"Many times I have learned that, you never judge a book by its cover. Like people, it is the inside that counts." Shannon Hale
"Personally, I believe 'Young Adult' to be an arbitrary title that means the book 'Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who's not quite an adult/Isn't really boring.' " Shannon Hale
"Reading a book is like going on a great journey. You don't know what'll happen, but something is bound to change. And for me, that change has always been good." Shannon Hale
"Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice." Shannon Hale
"A play for me never really takes on an aspect of reality until it has left the dryair of the study and begins to sniff the musty breezes of a bare stage." Moss Hart
"I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them." Moss Hart
"One begins with two people on the stage, and one of them had better say something pretty damn quick." Moss Hart
"Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession." Moss Hart
"Easy reading is damn hard writing." Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash." Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." Robert A. Heinlein
"My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter." Thomas Helm
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Ernest Hemingway
"It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way." Ernest Hemingway
"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it." Ernest Hemingway
"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges." Ernest Hemingway
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Ernest Hemingway
"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature." Ernest Hemingway
"Write drunk. Edit sober." Ernest Hemingway
"A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating." Frank Herbert
"But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things." Frank Herbert
"I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own." Frank Herbert
"There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story." Frank Herbert
"You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing." Frank Herbert
"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later." Patricia Highsmith
"Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!" Patricia Highsmith
"I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman." Patricia Highsmith
"I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to interfere with their work. I don't want them to interfere with mine." Patricia Highsmith
"I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone." Patricia Highsmith
"I read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else." Patricia Highsmith
"I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches." Patricia Highsmith
"If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies." Patricia Highsmith
"That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment." Patricia Highsmith
"An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place." Tony Hillerman
"You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart." Tony Hillerman
"I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind." Tony Hillerman
"The first Chapter Law is, 'Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it.' " Tony Hillerman
"Ideas come from everything." Alfred Hitchcock
"A good story is life with the dull parts taken out." Alfred Hitchcock
"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." Alfred Hitchcock
"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms." Alfred Hitchcock
"I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book." Alfred Hitchcock
"I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character." Alfred Hitchcock
"Puns are the highest form of literature." Alfred Hitchcock
"Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest." Alfred Hitchcock
"Self-plagiarism is style." Alfred Hitchcock
"The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture." Alfred Hitchcock
"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book—it makes a very poor doorstop." Alfred Hitchcock
"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Alfred Hitchcock
"When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.'" Alfred Hitchcock
"In the old days, villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings." Alfred Hitchcock
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay." Christopher Hitchens
"After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction." Alice Hoffman
"All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them—much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are." Alice Hoffman
"Books may well be the only true magic." Alice Hoffman
"Do people choose the art that inspires them—do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller." Alice Hoffman
"Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it—the information just disappears out of my head." Alice Hoffman
"I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?" Alice Hoffman
"I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working." Alice Hoffman
"I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself." Alice Hoffman
"I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist." Alice Hoffman
"I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life." Alice Hoffman
"I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing." Alice Hoffman
"I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays." Alice Hoffman
"No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written." Alice Hoffman
"Some stories stayed with you even when you wanted to forget them." Alice Hoffman
"That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination." Alice Hoffman
"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all." Billie Holiday
"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth." Khaled Hosseini
"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." Victor Hugo
"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark." Victor Hugo
"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life." Victor Hugo
"What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French." Victor Hugo
"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away." Victor Hugo
"I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one." Victor Hugo