“A page of good prose remains invincible.”
John Cheever
“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.”
Isaac Asimov
“The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.”
Alan Hollinghurst
“I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.”
Peter Matthiessen
“Writers can wear anything. I could go to a black-tie dinner in New York City with blue jeans on and boots and a cowboy hat and a bow tie, and people would just say, ‘Oh, he’s a writer.'”
John Grisham
“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”
Victor Hugo
“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.”
Franz Kafka