| "It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality." Francoise Sagan |
| "Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts." Blaise Pascal |
| "The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order." Jean Cocteau |
| "In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive." John Scott |
| "Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." Sir Winston Churchill |
| "Paperbacks blink in and out of print like fireflies. They also, as older collectors have ruefully discovered, fade and fall apart even more rapidly than their owners." Paul Gray |
| "I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can." Ernest Hemingway |
| "The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality." John Le Carre |
| "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." Henry David Thoreau |
| "For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom." Cao Yu |
| "A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors." Charles Baudelaire |
| "October gave a party; the leaves by hundreds came - the Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples, and leaves of every name. The sunshine spread a carpet, and everything was grand, Miss Weather led the dancing, Professor Wind the band." George Cooper |
| "A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy." Edward P. Morgan |
| "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading; - take them out of this book for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them." Laurence Sterne |
| "Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful." Alice Walker |
| "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." William Wordsworth |
| "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." T. S. Eliot |
| "If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well." Martin Luther King Jr |
| "We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books." Robert M. Hutchins, American University President, 1899-1977. |
| "It's not our abilities or gifts which define who we are, but the choices we make." Professor Dumbledore, character in the Harry Potter series of books by J.K. Rowling |
