Quotation Saturday

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

~Hart Crane

Let me walk through the fields of papertouching with my wanddry stems and stunted butterflies....

~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"

When you are describing,A shape, or sound, or tint;

Don't state the matter plainly,

But put it in a hint;

And learn to look at all things,

With a sort of mental squint.

~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.

~Jack Smith

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

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958