Lynda Barry Quotes

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

A book is not completed till it's read.

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.

I'm always reading. Here's where an ebook reader really comes into its own. When I travel, it allows me to carry a huge chunk of my library with me. Usually, when I am writing one project, I am researching the next or beginning to pull together the material for the book after that.

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.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.