Citat

"Frågar du mig om min religion så skall jag svara: den finner du i de stora lyrikernas oförgängligaste dikter."

— Verner von Heidenstam

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"Mången bok fungerar som nyckel till främmande salar i det egna slottet."

— Franz Kafka

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"Att skriva är ett slags terapi. Jag undrar ibland hur alla som varken skriver, komponerar eller målar lyckas hantera all den galenskap, melankoli och fasansfulla panik som ingår i all mänsklig tillvaro."

— Graham Greene

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"Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read."

  – Joyce Carol Oates

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"If the poem can be improved by the author’s explanations, it never should have been published."

– Archibald MacLeish

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"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it." 

– Ernest Hemingway

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"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."

— Carl Sagan

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"The first draft of anything is shit."

— Ernest Hemingway

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"Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t."

— Ernest Hemingway

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"Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal."

– Laura Miller

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"There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer."

– Pete Hamill

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"...books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them."

– Neil Gaiman

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"Endast det enklaste uttrycket är gott nog, i poesi som prosa."

– Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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"The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language."

– J. Michael Straczynski

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"Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what."

– Julia Cameron

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"Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"

– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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"Ett hus utan böcker, är som ett rum utan fönster."

– Heinrich Mann

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"Undvik som ett klipprev i havet de ovanliga och sällsynta orden."

– Gaius Julius Caesar

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»Liksom det är utmärkande för en klok man att säga mycket i få ord, har en dumbom tvärtom gåvan att tala mycket utan att säga något.«

– François de La Rochefoucauld

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»Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.«

– Aldous Huxley

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»Don't think and then write it down. Think on paper.«

– Harry Kemelman

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»En god berättares första egenskaper: förakt för sanningen och en djup respekt för det sannolika.«

– Fritiof Nilsson Piraten

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»Läser man länge, så lär man sig någonting, eller glömmer sorgen, eller somnar – men man vinner alltid någonting.«

– Henryk Sienkiewicz

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»A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.«

– Mark Twain

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»And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.«

– Sylvia Plath

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»I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.«

– Vladimir Nabokov

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»If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.«

– Benjamin Franklin

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»I am a part of everything that I have read.«

– John F. Kieran

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»Den som använder många ord för att förklara någonting, gömmer sig till största delen, som bläckfisken, i sitt eget bläck.« 

– John Ray

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»A man will turn over half a library to make one book.«

– Samuel Johnson

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»Those who write clearly have readers. Those who write obscurely have commentators.«

– Albert Camus

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»Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.«

– Hemingway

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»Alla som i någon mån skriver professionellt vet att det är svårare, men leder till skarpare texter, att tvingas fatta sig kort.«

– Maria Küchen

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»Don't think and then write. Think on paper.«

– Harry Kemelman

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»...that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills [...] My characters are galley slaves.«

– Vladimir Nabokov

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»...the essence of writing is rewriting.«

– William Zinsser

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»Skriva som om allting vore självklart, först då blir det underbara underbart. Skriva som om allting vore självklart, det är en ytterligt viktig grundsats. Man måste lära sig lita på läsaren, annars kan man aldrig lita på sig själv.«

– Gunnar Ekelöf

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»De som tala med förakt om filosofi och kammarliv har ingen aning om vad äventyrligt är.«

– Vilhelm Ekelund

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»You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.«

– Jack London

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»I mina ögon var de inte döda, det vill säga inte fullständigt döda; de hade förvandlats till böcker.«

– Sartre, om döda författare

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»There isn't any secret. You sit down and you start and that's it.«

– Elmore Leonard

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»The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.«

– C. Astrid Weber

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»Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.«

– John Ruskin

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»For Christ sake write and don't worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.«

– Ernest Hemingway, ur brev till F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

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»...skriva ska jag trots allt, till varje pris, det är min kamp för överlevnad.«

– Franz Kafka

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»Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.«

– Rita Dove

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»Every word written is a victory against death.«

– Michel Butor

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»Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.«

– James T. Farrell