"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."

Reading, Work, Listening, Practice

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"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."

Exlpore more Reading quotes

"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Reading, Escape, Story, Reality

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Novelist

Reading, Writing

"Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."

David Mitchell, British Novelist

Reading, Books, Mind, Escape, Suffering

"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."

Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Reading, Read, Statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"With a book he was regardless of time."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Reading, Books, Time, Passion, Escape

"I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."

David Foster Wallace, American Writer

Reading, Knowledge, Books, Curiosity

"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Joy, Books, Passion

"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."

S. A. Tawks, British Author

Reading, Impact, Culture, Imagination

"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."

Stephen King, American Author

Reading, Time, Distraction, Television

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."

Stephen King, American Author

Reading, Wisdom, Inspirational, Future

Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt

"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."

People

"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."

Time

"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."

Time

"Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life."

Life

"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."

Work

"The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up."

Job

"Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality."

Reality

"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."

Experience

"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive."

Time

"What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?"

Redemption