An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. – Juvenal, Satires
Writing is a struggle against silence. – Carlos Fuentes
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. – Elias Canetti
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Every word born of an inner necessity — writing must never be anything else. – Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski
Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man. – Emily Dickinson
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. – Jorge Luis Borges
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. – Miguel de Cervantes
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. – E.L. Doctorow
It is not my sentence that I polish, but my thought. I pause until the drop of light that I need is formed and falls from my pen. – Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), translated from French by George H. Calvert, 1
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. – Henry David Thoreau
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. – Adlai Stevenson, quoted in Ronald D. Fuchs, You Said a Mouthful
With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh: A Tale, 1849
Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers. – T.S. Eliot
