Alfred Kazin Quotes

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

I try to read writers who are better than me because it inspires me to be better.

Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven't yet done.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction. I subscribe to National Geographic, Scientific American, Discover, and a slew of other magazines. And it is while reading articles for pleasure and interest that an interesting 'What if?' will pop into my head.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

I'm older and wiser, but I still dream of doing new things and creating new things.

I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly, as I was able to, travelling around the world.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

I read a lot of books. I read because it inspires me and shows me paths that I could never imagine. Sometimes those paths are horrible and sad, and sometimes they are hopeful and amazing. Not always are they paths to the future, and sometimes the paths are actually about the past but make sense when applied to the future. Books are amazing.

I get inspired by many different things.

... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

I've lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity which I try and avoid.

I feel that what I do is a calling. I would pay to do what I do if I had to. I will never live long enough to do the work I want to do: the books I would like to write, the ideas I would like to explore.

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.

Money doesn't excite me - my ideas excite me.

Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.