My Favorite Quotes

• "There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either. "--
  Robert Graves

• "Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions. "--
  John Morley

• "Literature is news that stays news. "--
  Ezra Pound

• "Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. "--
  Jules Renard

• "Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise the muscles seize up "--
  Jane Yolen, Merlin

• "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein. "--
  Walter Smith

• "Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. "--
  Anne Dillard

• "Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders. "--
  Walter Bagehot

• "Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion. "--
  Arnold Bennett

• "Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them. "--
  Catherine Drinker Bowen

• "Writing 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. "--
  Winston Churchill

• "To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. "--
  Charles Caleb Colton

• "Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging. "--
  Patrick Dennis

• "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "--
  E. L. Doctorow

• "The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. "--
  E. L. Doctorow

• "Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live. "--
  Lucy Ellman

• "The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published. "--
  John Farrar

• "I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. "--
  William Faulkner

• "The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from. "--
  Gene Fowler

• "He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line. "--
  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

• "The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it. "--
  William Golding

• "A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer. "--
  George Gribbon

• "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. "--
  Ernest Hemingway

• "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. "--
  Ernest Hemingway

• "There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. "--
  Ernest Hemingway

• "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. "--
  Samuel Johnson

• "Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. "--
  Joseph Joubert

• "It requires more than mere genius to be an author. "--
  Jean De La Bruyere

• "The cure for writers cramp is writer's block. "--
  Inigo de Leon

• "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. "--
  Olin Miller

• "Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill. "--
  Edmund Morrison

• "Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. "--
  Iris Murdoch

• "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. "--
  Friedrich Nietzsche

• "Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally. "--
  Santha Rama Rau

• "A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others. "--
  Leo Rosten

• "Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness. "--
  Georges Simenon

• "Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman. "--
  Nancy Banks Smith

• "A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul. "--
  Count Leo Tolstoy

• "First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. "--
  Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

• "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for. "--
  Mark Twain

• "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. "--
  Mary Heaton Vorse

• "We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. "--
  Virginia Woolf

• "Writing is thinking on paper. "--
  William Zinsser

• "Poetry is what gets lost in translation."--
  Robert Frost

• "Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."--
  Don Marquis

  Starlight Over the Rhone

  ON CREATIVITY

• "The creative person wants to be a know -it -all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth -century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen. "--
  Carl Ally

• "Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun. "--
  Mary Lou Cook

• "Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. "--
  Lou Dorfsman

• "Imagination is more important than knowledge. "--
  Albert Einstein

• "The legs are the wheels of creativity. "--
  Albert Einstein

• "Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. "--
  Anna Freud

• "Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. "--
  Erich Fromm

• "We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought. "--
  Gilbert George

• "Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible -- he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are. "--
  Frank Goble

• "It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm. "--
  Mary Henle

• "Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement? "--
  Karen Horney

• "Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity. "--
  Jean Houston

• "Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. "--
  Norman Podhoretz

• "An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human. "--
  Man Ray

• "When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation. "--
  Margaret Sackville

• "It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create. "--
  John Saxe

• "The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough. "--
  Denise Shekerjian

• "Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life. "--
  Arianna Stassinopoulos

• "The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity. "--
  Margaret J. Wheatley

• "I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it. "--
  Winston Churchill

• "It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. "--
  Brenda Ueland

• "Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely. "--
  Vissarion Belinsky

• "All literature is political. "--
  LeVar Burton

• "English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action. "--
  Marilyn Butler

• "When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way. "--
  T. S. Eliot

• "People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad. "--
  Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency. "--
  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

• "I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions. "--
  Vaclav Havel

• "We shall not cease for exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. "--
  T.S. Eliot