top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium."
Standard
Customized
More
"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet."
Diversity
"A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story."
Instinct
"It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow."
Style
"I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published."
Being
"The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong."
Money
"I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command."
Success
"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel."
Writing
"My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history."
History
"When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery."
Computer
"Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment."
Balance
bottom of page