Mona > Mona's Quotes

“I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.”
― Abigail Reynolds, Pemberley by the Sea

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
― Boris Pasternak

“Those who hate rain hate life.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“only philosophy can go deep enough to show that literature goes still deeper than philosophy”
― Michel Serres

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

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

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“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

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“With writing, we have second chances.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.”
― Mik Everett

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
― Edward Albee

“أظن أن المترجم الجيد ينبغى أن يكون مريضاً نفسياً. هذا الشخص الذى يمنح كامل طاقته وموهبته لحساب شخص آخر. فى رأيى، الترجمة هى أعذب أنواع الجنون، وسنخسر كثيراً - ككتاب - لو تحقق الشفاء للمترجمين.”
― الكاتب الفرنسى دافيد فونكينوس

“It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.
We should do more of it.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!”
― Faiz Ahmed Faiz

“As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.”
― Nataly Kelly, Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain