“Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”

- Amiri Baraka

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“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.”

― Cormac McCarthy

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“Words are loaded pistols.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre

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“I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.”

- Martin Amis

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“A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.”

- Anton Chekhov

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“The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

- John Berryman

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“The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.”

- Andre Malraux

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“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”

- Willa Cather

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“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

- Bertrand Russell

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“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

- Jean Cocteau

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“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

- Meg Cabot

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“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”

- Nikolai Gogol

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“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.”

- Gustave Flaubert
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“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

- Evelyn Waugh

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“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”

- Herman Hesse

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“For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

- Audre Lorde

“Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.”

- Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

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“The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.”

- D.H. Lawrence

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Lisa Schwarzbaum gives The New Republic a B, noting that Lionel Shriver can “toss off a sharp sketch of a passing character in a phrase, and she’s got a gimlet eye for what’s phony, or affected, or even touchingly vain in human behavior.” (EW.com)

Joey Connelly surveys Michael McGriff’s second poetry collection, Home Burial, declaring it “an almost perfect volume.” (The Rumpus)

Curt Scleier goes between the covers of the “remarkably well researched, lucidly written “biography” of the institution” that is Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. (Seattle Times)

Julian Bell describes Tom Lubbock’s Until Further Notice, I Am Alive as the “moving final reflections of an endlessly curious art critic.” (The Guardian)