Jill Paton Walsh Quotes

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Reading is more important than writing.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.