“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.”
Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness
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Amos Oz12
Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual 1939–2018Related quotes
Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults
On being a writer in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)
José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature
Quoted in José Saramago: il bagaglio dello scrittore, page 41, by Giulia Lanciani, published by Bulzoni, 1996 ISBN 8871199332, 9788871199337 (256 pages).
Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer
"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)
Context: I don't know many writers. [... ] Well, I dunno, but I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write. I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live, he observes.
“People are best on records and books because you can turn them off or put them back on the shelf.”
Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter
Source: Solipsist
William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor
Introduction, p. viii.
On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976)