"The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life."

Miller, Henry on art
4 fans of this quote   

"Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything."

Miller, Henry on repentance   

"An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness."

Miller, Henry on solitude
9 fans of this quote   

"A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat."

Miller, Henry on books - reading
5 fans of this quote   

"The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life."

Miller, Henry on bores and boredom   

"We do not talk -- we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."

Miller, Henry on conversation
4 fans of this quote   

"There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."

Miller, Henry on creativity   

"Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

Eliot, George on inspiration   

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

Thoreau, Henry David on inspiration
5 fans of this quote   

"To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do."

Aristotle on writers and writing
17 fans of this quote   

"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."

Asimov, Isaac on writers and writing
11 fans of this quote   

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

Bach, Richard on writers and writing
16 fans of this quote   

"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."

Benjamin, Walter on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

Berger, Thomas on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write."

Boileau, Nicholas on writers and writing
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"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word."

Bowen, Catherine Drinker on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame."

Bronte, Charlotte on writers and writing   

"Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic."

Burchill, Julie on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all."

Byron, Lord on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."

Carlyle, Thomas on writers and writing   

"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values."

Cather, Willa on writers and writing   

"Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love."

Chandler, Raymond on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."

Lennon, John on madness
6 fans of this quote   

"Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on courage
55 fans of this quote   

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more."

Churchill, Winston on quotations
37 fans of this quote   

"One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well."

Alcott, Amos Bronson on quotations
5 fans of this quote   

"Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings."

Alger, William R. on quotations   

"I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence."

Burns, Robert on quotations
6 fans of this quote   

"Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more."

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on quotations   

"The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation."

Disraeli, Isaac on quotations
4 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on quotations   

"He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on quotations   

"Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on quotations
7 fans of this quote   

"Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external."

Guiney, Louise Imogen on quotations   

"He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind."

Johnson, Samuel on quotations   

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading."

Choate, Rufus on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

"A book is the only immortality."

Choate, Rufus on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind."

Chambers, Robert on books - reading
4 fans of this quote   

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"

Beecher, Henry Ward on books - reading
13 fans of this quote