The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. – Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. – Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948