“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

[Poets are] men stepping on clouds, snaring a world of beauty from the trees and sky, half wild, half human.

— Dylan Thomas

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
— Eleanor Roosevelt

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man: nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
— Clarence Day

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
— Elie Wiesel