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Quotes for Writers
arranged by last name: a-h I i-p I q-z

The statements quoted below have variously heartened and chastened me over the years. Some have served as epigraphs for books of mine; all have functioned as provocations. I apologize for my inability to source them all precisely; a number of them come from notebooks of mine kept in a period when I had forsworn scholarly concerns, while I found others in sources that themselves lacked footnotes. Any more exact citation of source or correction of inaccuracy will be appreciated.

-- A. D. C.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
-- Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
-- Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
The value of a book is not in the book, it is in the subsequent behavior of its readers.
-- Wendell Johnson, People in Quandaries
(New York: Harper and Bros., 1946), p. 206
There is no substitute for critical tradition: a continuum of understanding, early commenced. . . . Precisely because William Blake's contemporaries did not know what to make of him, we do not know either, though critic after critic appeases our sense of obligation to his genius by reinventing him. . . . In the 1920s, on the other hand, something was immediately made of Ulysses and "The Waste Land," and our comfort with both works after 50 years, including our ease at allowing for their age, seems derivable from the fact that they have never been ignored.
-- Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 415.
The crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator's masterful control over his own self-exposure. . . . He must be the ringmaster of his self-display.
-- Wendy Lesser, The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
Freedom is always the freedom for others to think differently.
-- Rosa Luxembourg
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann
All action is a form of speech. Language is the shape life takes passing through us; it is how we pay homage to things and preserve them. What one works toward is this: that there be no difference between the man, the life, the voice, that all become a way of standing in the world, a kind of witness.
-- Peter Marin, In a Man's Time
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974)

Copyright © 2004 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.