"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for."

Hammarskjold, Dag on purpose
12 fans of this quote   

"Great writers are the saints for the godless."

Brookner, Anita on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"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   

"Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus."

Bagnold, Enid on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about."

Auden, W. H. on writers and writing
8 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   

"The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born."

Adler, Renata on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed."

Pound, Ezra on death
6 fans of this quote   

"The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside."

Hammarskjold, Dag on self-talk
5 fans of this quote   

"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."

Brooks, Mel on writers and writing
9 fans of this quote