“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

April 6, 1775
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

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Samuel Johnson362

English writer 1709–1784

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“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 6, 1775
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

“It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Source: Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 144

“A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. ”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

“For seven blissful years I had spent my time reading, writing and researching a book about introversion. But the publication date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

Essay: "An Introvert Steps Out," "Sunday Book Review" section of The New York Times, online April 27, 2012 and in print April 29, 2012.

“Any writer, reading over the typescript of a book for the last time before sending it off to the publisher, must wonder what all the effort was for.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Introduction" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/1.htm <br class="br">An Autobiographical Novel (1991) <br class="br">Context: Any writer, reading over the typescript of a book for the last time before sending it off to the publisher, must wonder what all the effort was for. An autobiography is specially in need of justification to its author. It is a work of self-justification which itself needs justifying. Why have I written this book? Why have I written it the way I have? What does it mean to me? What do I hope it will mean to others?<br>Each human being has at the final core of self a crystal from which the whole manifold of the personality develops, a secret molecular lattice which governs the unfolding of all the structures of the individuality, in time, in space, in memory, in action and contemplation. Asleep there were just these dreams and no others. Awake there were these actions only. Only these deeds came into being.

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

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