“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”

- Saul Bellow

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Juliet Nicolson’s Abdication manages only two stars, and Maria Peunte calls it a “ho-hum novel of Wallis and Edward.” (USAToday)

Tyrone Beason declares Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears a “profoundly detailed study of love and grief.” (Seattle Times)

Patrick Anderson is intrigued by Qiu Xiaolong’s Don’t Cry, Tai Lake for its “political edge, but endearing innocence.” (Washington Post)

Michael Berry calls John Irving’s In One Person a puzzling, not-quite-one-thing, not-quite-the-other literary enterprise.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”

- Hermann Hesse

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“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”

― Madeleine L’Engle

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“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, and constant.”

- Edna Ferber

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For the wolf of a writer, the family is a crowd of sitting ducks. There they assemble at the Thanksgiving table, poor dears — blithering uncles, drugged-out siblings, warring couples — posing for a painting, though they do not know it.

-Roger Rosenblatt

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“Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one word to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective . . . . When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway, a porter smoking a pipe, or a cab stand, show me that grocer and that porter . . . in such a way that I could never mistake them for any other grocer or porter, and by a single word give me to understand wherein the cab horse differs from fifty others before or behind it.”

- Gustave Flaubert

“If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.”

- Shelby Foote

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“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

― E.E. Cummings

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“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

― Doris Lessing

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“Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.”

-Paulo Coelho

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“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

- Dorothy Parker

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“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

- Henry James

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“I get angry about things, then go on and work.”

- Toni Morrison

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“Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”

- W.H. Auden

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“I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

― Philip Larkin

“It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”

- Thomas Pynchon

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“To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts - absolute gifts - which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul.”

- Kate Chopin

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“The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can’t.”

- Levon Helm

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