Book & Writing Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

A pun is two strings of thought tied with an acoustic knot.

She has tiny handwriting, as though written by ants for the purpose of smuggling messages out of prison.

Two people write a novel like three people have a baby.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

“I personally” is the linguistic equivalent of ordering chips with rice.

Words are a currency, and collecting them is a form of wealth.

The enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

George Orwell

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling

To expect a man to retain everything he has read, is like expecting him to carry in his body everything he has ever eaten.

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they don't clearly focus.

A great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and again in old age; like a fine building, it should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.

Language is more fashion than science; in matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation, tend to wander like hemlines.

She collects quotations like Nabokov collected butterflies.

Books won't stay banned or burnt. Ideas won't go to jail. Throughout history, the censor has always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

Every great person has their disciples, but it's always Judas who writes the biography.

An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ideas are to literature as light is to art.

Books are like lobster shells: we surround ourselves with them, then we grow out, and leave them behind as evidence of our earlier development.

Smilies are like love songs; they describe much but prove nothing.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G.K. Chesterton

The shelf life of a hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

( Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. )

If this story was oil then it would drain the wells of Saudi Arabia.

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

St. Augustine

Your handwriting transforms a simple address into a Sanskrit poem.

Books are sepulchres of thought that await resurrection.

As a writer, when I see a paragraph shrink like a strip of bacon on a skillet — I know I'm on the right lines.

( I love being a writer, but what I can't stand is the paperwork. )

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands — someone from whom you can accept the anaesthetic with confidence.

Saul Bellow

He tortures the English Language but never succeeds in forcing it to reveal its meaning.

It's fatal to know too much at the start: boredom comes quickly to the traveller who knows the route; as to the novelist too certain of her plot.

Trim sentences, like trim bodies, require more effort than flabby ones.

One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality. Good prose is like a window pane.

George Orwell

Translations, like wives, are rarely faithful if they are at all attractive.