The majority of writers ought to translate themselves; there are but few thoughts that are born translated, that is, clothed with the power best fitted alike to express and transmit them. What we have in the first instance written for ourselves, should be written a second time for others. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847), Literature. First Section: Literature in Gene

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

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