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.
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.
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.
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.
Details create the big picture.
I try to use short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters to keep the reader's interest.
A great book is one, which really don't finish when it finishes.
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
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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.
Assume that your reader is tired, bored, and pressed for time.
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.
The most important things aren't always in the main story; sometimes the real meaning is scribbled in the margins.
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.
Your time is precious so this book is short and to the point.
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.
You want to write something as good as what you've read.
Endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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.
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
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.
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.
THE END OF PART ONE
One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
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.
Books are like tweets, except longer.
Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Epilogue Chapter One
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.
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.
A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
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.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
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.
Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
A full description of a person's life, however uneventful or uninteresting, fills a large folder.
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.
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.
The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.
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.
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.
I'm a voracious reader.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
I am a writer of fragments.
Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
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.
a lifetime of stories
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.
In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.
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.
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.
Specificity is the soul of narrative.
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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.
Judge a book by the way you feel after you read the last page.
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
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.
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.
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.
read till the end of your day
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.
In judging a practical book, everything turns on the ends or goals.
What you read when you don't have to ...Read-- Oscar Wilde
You will never finish your novels if you don't take it one word at a time
A good book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
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.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
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.
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.
long stories in the same series (as well as a couple of stabs at mainstream stories).
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.
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.
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.
I am an avid reader.
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.
A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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.