Quotes Part 19
“He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.” — Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
‘All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
Philip Pullman
‘Writing is not a job description. A great deal of it is luck. Don’t do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of their life to it. I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths.’ – Margaret Atwood
‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’ – Emily Dickinson
‘I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all, they are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.’ – Somerset Maugham
‘The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.’ – Allan Sillitoe
‘Once a book has been declared a bestseller, its sales accelerate – like the freshwater polyp the best seller breeds from itself – and the book-buyer can happily accept the judgement of the great majority.’ – Frank Muir
‘If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.’ – Isaac Asimov
‘I think readers who aren’t used to reading contemporary poetry are surprised to find it’s about our world now, our experience; it talks about movies and pop music and stuff. It’s not some fuddy-duddy thing, and most of it contains a good deal of imaginative brilliance. My experience is that when people read contemporary poetry they are engaged and interested in a way they did not expect to be.’ – John Stammers
‘The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ – T S Eliot