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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.

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
-- Jean Rhys, in an interview in The Paris Review (No. 76, Fall 1979)
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wisdom of the Sands: Spiritual Science (University of Chicago Press, 1979; originally published as Citadelle, 1948)
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (1881)
[T]he real meaning of that misused word "inspiration" is not that the writer waits for inspiration and then writes like crazy, but rather that it's sweatingly, dreadfully hard work, and while you're writing, something drops from the study ceiling.
-- Mary Stewart, New York Times Book Review, September 2, 1979
One should challenge accepted thinking, particularly one's own.
-- Edward Weston
Sufficient for the morning is the pleasure thereof, and one of the most unfailing pleasures is to sit down in the morning and write.
-- Leonard Woolf, Autobiography, vol. 5 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969)
[W]hen and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.
-- Philip Wylie, Opus 21 (New York: Rinehart, 1949)

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