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.

Reading can seriously damage your ignorance:

Reading can seriously damage your ignorance.

- Anonymous.

Madeleine L'Engle, on writing:

A book comes and says, 'Write me.’

- Madeleine L'Engle.

W. Somerset Maugham, on writing:

There are three rules for writing a novel.

Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

- W. Somerset Maugham.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions.

To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

George V. Higgins, on writing:

Show the reader what the character thinks about,

and then the reader will think about it, too.

- George V. Higgins.

Julia Alvarez, on writing:

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention.

I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write.

It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

– Julia Alvarez.

Stephen King, on writing:

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art.

The water is free.

So drink.

Drink and be filled up.

- Stephen King.

Ursula K. Le Guin, on books:

By and large books are mankind's best invention.

– Ursula K. Le Guin.

Roald Dahl, on books:

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

go throw your TV set away,

and in its place you can install,

a lovely bookcase on the wall.

- Roald Dahl.

Margaret Atwood, on books and reading:

Books are frozen voices,

in the same way that musical scores are frozen music.

The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it,

releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard.

And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken,

if only in the writer's head.

They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds.

The reader is the musician of the book:

each reader may read the same text,

just as each violinist plays the same piece,

but each interpretation is different.

– Margaret Atwood.

George R. R. Martin, on reading:

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen.

The man who never reads lives only one.

- George R. R. Martin.

Toni Morrison, on writing:

Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things

that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

– Toni Morrison.

Mark Twain, on books:

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

- Mark Twain.

Beverly Cleary, on books:

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary.

Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise?

The dictionary knows.

The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.

- Beverly Cleary.

Stephen King, on reading:

Few things are as lovely as having an uninterrupted hour with a good book.

- Stephen King.