Writers' Quotes

Writing and artists' Quotes

"I always think that an artist's was the hardest life of all.  Its rigour - not always apparent to an outside observer - is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintain faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve.  This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder" Lucien Freud

“One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions”  Salman Rushdie

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”  Percy Bysshe Shelley

“O!  For a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention” William Shakespeare

“Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write” Anthony Trollope

“Only connect!  Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height”  E M Forster

“Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made”  Gore Vidal

"I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg.  There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows”  Ernest Hemingway

“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism.  Only love can apprehend and hold them, and be just toward them”  Rainer Maria Rilke

“Writing does not exclude the full life;  It demands it”  Katherine Anne Porter

“Literature must be written from the periphery toward the centre… The man who is in the center does not have anything to write”  Kenzburo Oe

“Treat every moment with reverence”  Bharati Mukherjee

“Never trust the artist.  Trust the tale”  D H Lawrence

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all”  John Keats

“A book should be as an axe, to break the frozen sea within us”  Franz Kafka

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry”  William Butler Yeats

“Any authentic creation is a gift to the future”  Albert Camus

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“She me a hero and I will write you a tragedy”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

“For me writing ---- the only possible writing --- is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases”  Joseph Conrad