Quotation Saturday

Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.
~ Juvenal (AD 60-130)

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
~William Gass, "Habitations of the Word," Kenyon Review, October 1984

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
~ Graycie Harmon

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
~ Samuel Butler

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
~ Harold Ross

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
~ Edgar Allan Poe