“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”

-Catherine Drinker Bowen

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“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”

- Thomas Mann

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“Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.”

-Cyril Connolly

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“Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

- John Irving

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“If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. “

-E.M. Forster

“Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.”

-Henry Miller

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“I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively…For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don’t lie to yourself and use the wrong words. “

-Hunter S. Thompson

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“Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring.”

- Bob Considine

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“Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.”

- William Golding

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“Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connection whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. “

- Virginia Woolf

“The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvellously through the tangles of his later years.”

-Roald Dahl

“I wrote about how my mum put sixpence in the Christmas pudding - which wasn’t true - and he didn’t put it on the wall. I thought he’d rumbled me, but he came up to me later and put his arm round me and said ‘By the way, Simon, that was a really good poem’, and I thought, ‘Well, why didn’t you put it on the fucking wall, then?’ And I’ve wondered since then if I’ve just been pursuing a revenge career. Every time I finish a piece I think, ‘Put that on your wall!’”

- Simon Armitage

“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”

-H.L. Menken

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“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

- William Faulkner

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“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”

- Seamus Heaney

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“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. ”

-Kurt Vonnegut

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“Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.”

-Seneca

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“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”

- Pearl S. Buck

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“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

-E.L. Doctorow

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“The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.”

- John Updike

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