Words worth keeping

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.