Louis Aragon Quotes

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

I have read your book and much like it.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

Yet if strict criticism should till frown on our method, let candor and good humor forgive what is done to the best of our judgment, for the sake of perspicuity in the story and the delight and entertainment of our candid reader.

When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.