John Cheever
“Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”
John Cheever
“A book should try to accomplish something more than just to repeat a child’s own experiences. One would hope rather to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end, to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar; and perhaps to lift him for a few moments from his own problems of shoe laces that won’t tie and busy parents and mysterious clock time into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story.”
Margaret Wise Brown
“If I write for anything, it’s to bring order out of chaos, but not too much. A wee bit of disorder never did any harm.”
Kathleen Jamie
“You must not come lightly to the blank page.”
Stephen King
“You can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
Christopher Morley
“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”
Annie Dillard
“No one is a great poet because she is a miserable drunk. No one is a great poet because he has had a nervous breakdown. Suffering, however, can be experienced as a curse or a blessing; the luckiest is the one who can experience it as a blessing.”
Carolyn Forché