Madeleine L'Engle, on writing:

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

- Madeleine L'Engle.

Lauren Oliver, on books:

But ... books are so much more.

Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners.

Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.

And some of them – the best ones – are doors.

– Lauren Oliver.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

It interests me to imagine characters shifting

from one situation and one location to another

for whatever the circumstances may be.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Veronica Roth, on writing:

I've done without doing things, like sleeping and eating, but I need to write.

- Veronica Roth.

Julia Alvarez, on writing and reading:

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

– Julia Alvarez.

Shannon Hale, on words:

Words can fall hard like a boulder loosed from a cliff.

Words can drift unnoticed like a weed seed on a breeze.

Words can sing.

- Shannon Hale.

Ursula K. Le Guin, on books and reading:

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.

And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

– Ursula K. Le Guin.

Mabel Seeley, on imagination:

Imagination is so much harder to face than reality.

– Mabel Seeley.

Mary Higgins Clark, on writing:

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite.

My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

- Mary Higgins Clark.

Anne Rice, on writing:

Go where the pleasure is in your writing.

Go where the pain is.

Write the book you would like to read.

Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found.

But write.

And remember, there are no rules for our profession.

Ignore rules.

Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you.

Do it your own way.

Every writer knows fear and discouragement.

Just write.

The world is crying for new writing.

It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories.

If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any.

- Anne Rice.

Madeleine L'Engle, on writing:

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

- Madeleine L'Engle.

Anne Rice, on writing:

Obsession led me to write.

It's been that way with every book I've ever written.

I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

- Anne Rice.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

I approach writing stories as a recorder.

I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Shannon Hale, on writing:

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

- Shannon Hale.

Rebecca Stead, on writing:

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another –

it's a lot of writing and then rewriting,

restructuring the story,

changing the way things come together.

- Rebecca Stead.

Elie Wiesel, on writing:

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

- Elie Wiesel.

Ann Patchett, on imagination:

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.

- Ann Patchett.

Groucho Marx, on television and books:

I find television very educating.

Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

- Groucho Marx.

June 21 – World Music Day:

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

- Ludwig van Beethoven.

Music was my refuge.
I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

- Maya Angelou.

Life would be flat without music.
It is the background to all I do.
It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else.

- Ludwig van Beethoven.

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

- Confucius.

Music is the medicine of the mind.

- John Logan.

If music be the food of love, play on.

- William Shakespeare.

I think it's almost a law of nature that there are only certain things that hit an emotive space,

and that's what was always special for me about music: it made me feel something.

- Kate Bush.

Music can change the world.

- Ludwig van Beethoven.

Julia Alvarez, on writing:

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk.

It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this:

that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in.

'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem.

And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house

is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

– Julia Alvarez.