Literary Exploration Quotes

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

The first thing I do in any town I come to is ask if it has a bookstore.

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

I'm always reading. I've loved reading since I was young, and I've always loved sinking my teeth into a different world, especially one that you begin to create in your head.

Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Ive read an awful lot of books, Ive read alot of awful books

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.