Poisoned; thus, therapy

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation."

- Graham Greene

"Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice- they all make the fuel."

- Edna Ferber

Read, read, then write

"Read, read, read. Read everything- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."

- William Faulkner

"An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many and grows inveterate in their insane hearts."

- Juvenal

"Writing is for the most part a lonely and unsatisfying ocupation. One is tied to a table, a chair, a stack of paper."

- Graham Greene

Drops of Blood

"Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs."

- Erica Jong

"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."

- Gene Fowler

"... there are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed."

- John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Self-exposure

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."

- Aldous Huxley

"I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street."

- James Jones

"One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors."

- Lord Goodman

 

Better Than a Cat

"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.... It is not true that we only have one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."

-  S.I. Hayakawa

"When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before."

- Clifton Fadiman

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."

- E.M. Forster

The Grind

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."

- John Ciardi

"A serious reviewer should have an ax to grind. If you don't, your judgements will appear ephemeral, casual, even indifferent. But when you have an ax to grind, it is essential that you should not know what it is, and neither should anyone else."

- Anatole Broyard

"The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read."

- Norman Cousins

Please Don't Yell

Actor Joe Pantoliano was diagnosed as being clinically depressed. He was relieved that the problem was identified and he was able to do something about it. 

He said: "Mental disease is the only thing you can be diagnosed with and get yelled at for having. Why is that?"

Yeah, why is that?

Distilled Failures

"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies."

- John Dos Passos

"I write a lot- every day, seven days a week- and I throw a lot away. Sometimes I think I write to throw away; it's a process of distillation."

- Donald Barthelme

"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."

- Raymond Chandler

Being Happy Being Weak

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
- Henry Ward Beecher

"An ordinary man can…surround himself with two thousand books… and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy."
- Augustine Birrell

"Publication- is the auction of the Mind of Man."
- Emily Dickinson

Necessities

"A room without books is like a body without soul."

- Cicero

"When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."

- Desiderius Erasmus

"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them- peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances."

- Winston Churchill