Quotation Saturday

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost

***

Know the rules, and the rules will make you free.
~Orson Scott Card

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
~Mark Twain

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
~Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged... I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
~Erica Jong