Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Summaries. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Summaries Quotes And Sayings by 95 Authors including James Baldwin,Amos Bronson Alcott,Florence King,Sanford I. Weill,Nelson Demille for you to enjoy and share.

Summaries Quotes : pic 001090854
Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000065260
Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000049771
I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000065001
Details create the big picture.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000043533
I try to use short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters to keep the reader's interest.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000831016
A great book is one, which really don't finish when it finishes.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001721204
Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves
Summaries Quotes : pic 000797324
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000305349
In the summer, we write life's summary with the slow waves of love flowing over the sandy beach. The slow breeze and the warm sun write our memories.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000333690
Assume that your reader is tired, bored, and pressed for time.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000499499
Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000959209
The most important things aren't always in the main story; sometimes the real meaning is scribbled in the margins.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001192982
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001382226
Your time is precious so this book is short and to the point.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000825390
Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side - wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000094681
You want to write something as good as what you've read.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000591197
Endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000266072
A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001634534
In the analysis of books, as in the analysis of complex world events, we hover between two kinds of error: ascribing too much meaning where there is little, if any, to be found, and ignoring meaning that stares us right in the face.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001111793
One book led to another; reading during my free time became a new fondness. Nonetheless, there was never much consideration of being a scholar when beginning to do so. The titles I was turning to seemed to speak directly to me, and soon the reviews became one of my favorite things to do.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001238805
There are tales that rise like the early sun, breathe, and take on a life of their own. There are ones that flow quietly and effortlessly until time forsakes them, but there are others that fight until they find their way to the edge of reality, as if coming straight out of a dream.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000072337
As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001307819
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000530400
Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000157329
The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient ... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature
Summaries Quotes : pic 000703067
Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible
if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001021641
There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001869887
THE END OF PART ONE
Summaries Quotes : pic 001071201
One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000428202
Details, when they are successful, are not mere decoration. They do not distract or entertain. They lead to an understanding of the whole of which they are an inherent part.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001680486
Books are like tweets, except longer.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001066304
Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Epilogue Chapter One
Summaries Quotes : pic 001118053
The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page
perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001206837
I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000494657
A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001643095
Should you dare to ride this dreadful beast, you would awaken later as if from a deep sleep, with some of these printed scraps clutched in your hands. Fragments would hint at ideal books, impossible books, books that you have always longed to read.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001765131
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001046258
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000192418
I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001419198
Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001022083
By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000066232
I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000000012
I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001454565
I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000298296
I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000866879
Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Summaries Quotes : pic 001031951
The novels of our lives are written only partly by ourselves; other forces regularly grab the pen, interpolating strange deviations and digressions, enforced changes of pace, character or plot.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001533123
The more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000796890
Between a book's covers there may be passion, bile, mayhem, or murder, but in the quiet spaces where it awaits its fate (either acceptance of indifference) all is calm.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000239459
Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book ...
Summaries Quotes : pic 001233856
A full description of a person's life, however uneventful or uninteresting, fills a large folder.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000179269
In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001428689
It is the common experience, after all, that things that are well written are not only read with enjoyment by those who come to them for the first time, but also do not fail to be enjoyed when read again by those who know them and whose memory of them has not faded away.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001303753
The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001508925
We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001110621
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001807743
I'm a voracious reader.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000474977
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001696498
I am a writer of fragments.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000300316
Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001528172
With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001342898
a lifetime of stories
Summaries Quotes : pic 001123056
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000387041
In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000957766
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001212505
A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001619673
Specificity is the soul of narrative.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001157668
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001594600
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001271764
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001226559
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001637657
Judge a book by the way you feel after you read the last page.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000706336
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001860946
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000371929
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001100888
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001006540
Each sentence should have proper meaning, details should not be needlessly repeated, and every sentence should add to the entertainment value in one way or another.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001627758
It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001533911
Story has staying power. We remember the illustrations from Sunday's sermon for months afterward, but by coffee hour we're already struggling to recite the pastor's three main points, despite various acronyms meant to help us.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001173657
read till the end of your day
Summaries Quotes : pic 001392867
Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000908761
In judging a practical book, everything turns on the ends or goals.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001386372
What you read when you don't have to ...
Summaries Quotes : pic 000833561
You will never finish your novels if you don't take it one word at a time
Summaries Quotes : pic 001455365
A good book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000542449
A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000464292
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001001568
We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal
Summaries Quotes : pic 001197220
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000563735
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000437303
I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001291272
long stories in the same series (as well as a couple of stabs at mainstream stories).
Summaries Quotes : pic 000139417
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001561661
It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001325159
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000015140
I am an avid reader.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001489494
Since I've been rereading this book I'm anchored at point zero, considering a thousand strategies and points of view which soon dissolve, abstraction, abstraction, the gaze melts.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000113317
A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
Summaries Quotes : pic 001553707
Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Summaries Quotes : pic 000932023
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.