Literary Quotations

• Never open your book with weather - Elmore Leonard
• Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke - F Scott Fitzgerald
• Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators - Albert Camus
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out - George Orwell (who really could have cut two words out of this statement.)
• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talk about writing or themselves - Lillian Hellman
• This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl - Dylan Thomas on At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
• Proust changed my life with books one, two and three. I'll read more of Moby Dick, but three Proust books may have to suffice - Jonathan Franzen
• I don't fire up the prose, I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it - Raymond Carver
• Just remember how many writers down the ages have written to entertain, and who remembers them now? - Miguel Angel Asturias
• You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then get somebody to add commas, maybe fix the spelling. They have people who do that - Elmore Leonard

Quotations

Here are some great literary type quotations.
"I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add." - Gore Vidal
"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts" - Charles Dickens
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." - Frank Zappa
"I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams
I'll leave you with these thoughts as I go back to my reading.
Here's a snippet from my to read pile.
Max Barry - Company
Kurt Busiek - Astro City: Local Heroes
Harold Bloom - Genius. A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
David Winner - Those Feet. A Sensual History of English Football