Christine > Christine's Quotes

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Letters

“But race is the child of racism, not the father.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.

Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.”
― Peter Ferry, Travel Writing

“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth

“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
― Philip José Farmer

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
― Shannon Hale