“ Is there no way out of the mind? — Sylvia Plath

“ A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

— Vladimir Nabokov

“ Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

— P.J. O’Rourke



“ The weirder you are going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

— P. J. O’Rourke

“ It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

— Ernest Hemingway

“ Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within



“ Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

— Maria Mitchell, American astronomer

“ A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

— Steven Wright



“ Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they’re going to finish it. Second, they think somebody’s going to publish it. Third, they think somebody’s going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody’s going to like it. How optimistic is that?

— Margaret Atwood

“ No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

— Robert Byrne

“ I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream.”

~Tove Jansson

“ I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.

— David Foster Wallace



“ A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

—

The Economist