Quotes from the Best

I've put together a short list of quotes from some of literature's Greatest. I hope they serve to inspire you and support you in your quest towards writing. One thing I've taken away from reading about writers is how individually unique we all are. There is no ONE way to write. So always follow your heart, connect with your soul, and you will never fail. Simone De Beauvoir What is the imagination? In the long run, it's a matter of attaining a certain degree of generality, of truth about what is, about what one actually lives. Gabriel Garcia Marquez The writer's very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it. Joyce Carol Oats One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood." In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function-a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind-then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Kurt Vonnegut If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again. Toni Morrison I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. If they're based on somebody else, in a funny way it's an infringement of a copyright. That person owns his life, has a patent on it. It shouldn't be available for fiction. T.S. Eliot I feel quite sure that if I'd started by having independent means, if I hadn't had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening influence on me. I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts. Edna O'Brien So for both men and women writers, writing is an eminently masochistic exercise. But a woman wirter has a double dose of masochism: the masochism of the woman and that of the artist. No way to dodge it or escape from it. But there is a certain dogged strength in realizing that you can make those delirious journeys and come through. It is only by the grace of god, and perhaps willpower, that one comes through each time.