Lloyd Alexander, on reading:

Keep reading.

It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.

- Lloyd Alexander.

Caroline Gordon, on books and reading:

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

– Caroline Gordon.

Dr. Seuss, on books:

Fill your house with stacks of books,

in all the crannies and all the nooks.

- Dr. Seuss.

Sylvia Plath, on being a writer and an introvert:

We stayed at home to write,

to consolidate our outstretched selves.

- Sylvia Plath.

Kurt Vonnegut, on reading and writing:

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history,

we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

This to me is a miracle.

– Kurt Vonnegut.

Anne Fadiman, on literature:

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

- Anne Fadiman.

Edgar Allan Poe, on inspiration and writing:

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

- Edgar Allan Poe.

Laini Taylor, on writing and reading:

I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough.

It does not, for example, contain dragons.

I find this unsatisfactory.

So I read.

And I write.

- Laini Taylor.

C. S. Lewis, on experience and inspiration:

Experience: that most brutal of teachers.

But you learn, my God do you learn.

- C. S. Lewis.

Anna Quindlen, on books:

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.

They are the destination, and the journey.

They are home.

- Anna Quindlen.

Kurt Cobain, on inspiration:

Thank you for the tragedy.

I need it for my art.

- Kurt Cobain.

Anne Michaels, on books:

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

- Anne Michaels.

Ben Kingsley, on writers and inspiration:

All the great writers root their characters in true human behavior.

- Ben Kingsley.

Amy Waldman, on writing:

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction.

Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

- Amy Waldman.

Ernest Hemingway, on writing:

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible.

There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

– Ernest Hemingway.

Geraldine Brooks, on writing:

I swim in a sea of words.

They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

– Geraldine Brooks.

Stephen King, on writing:

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.

Anais Nin, on writing:

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

- Anais Nin.

Theodore Roosevelt, on books:

There are rainy days in autumn and stormy days in winter

when the rocking chair in front of the fire

simply demands an accompanying book.

- Theodore Roosevelt.

Caitlin Flanagan, on writing:

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path -

keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

- Caitlin Flanagan.