You will never be alone, with a Poet in your Poket. You will never have an idle Hour. ~John Adams to John Quincy Adams, 1781

I believe in poetry's capacity to make and remake the world. ~Kenzie Allen

If we were a people more given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (includes preachers, musicians and blues singers). ~Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I believe talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent. ~Maya Angelou

If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won't happen. ~Margaret Atwood

Thinking of anything was beyond him. I sympathize. I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin. ~Donald Barthelme, "The Dolt"

The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. ~Gloria Anzaldua

When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway. ~James Baldwin

Poets often disagree with themselves, which is one of the things that makes them poets. ~Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

Words are all we have. ~Samuel Beckett

All words are pegs to hang ideas on. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore! ~Henry Ward Beecher

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ~Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. ~Jorge Luis Borges

I look upon ideas as great big bulldogs that bite me, grab me, hold on, and won't let go. And when I get a good idea it simply seizes me and holds on very tightly. And maybe an hour later or ten hours later or two days later it lets go and I'm finished with it. I'm not in Control; I have no schedule for my life, these ideas just come up and beg to bite me, and I let them. ~Ray Bradbury, introduction to 1976 audiobook of Fahrenheit 451

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

Libraries raised me. ~Ray Bradbury

This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies. ~Ray Bradbury, introduction to Dandelion Wine

I've had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads "Don't think!" You must never think at the typewriter--you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. ~Ray Bradbury

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves. ~Kate Braverman

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. ~Joseph Brodsky

The first duty of an Author is--I conceive--a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities. ~Charlotte Brontë

As a stalwart reader of printed books, I'm left to wonder what will happen to the wide, slow silty river of the their history, to the countless volumes waiting now in the abandoned silence of library stacks. Stacks: The word itself connects books to the harvest, to corn and hay. They were always earthbound. Smell the must, feel the brittle, browning pages between your thumb and forefinger. The tears, the cracked spines, the stains and folds. Even if we readers forget them, printed books will hold us in their memory. ~Jane Brox, Illuminating Texts

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well. ~Charles Bukowski

I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems. ~Charles Bukowski

Read the books they don't want you to. That's where the good stuff is. ~Levar Burton

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it. ~Octavia Butler

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. ~Octavia Butler

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~Italo Calvino

Life is always there waiting to be transfigured into a splendid fiction, however sad or sordid its origins. ~Sarah Churchwell, Careless People

I think everyone has in his or her self the urge to express, and people do it with what they love, I suppose. Cooks do it with food; there are people who do it with hair, with clothing, fabric. I loved words, always, the sound of words, the feeling of words in my mouth, and so I did it that way. ~Lucille Clifton

To write is the joy and the torment of the idle. ~Colette

A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad. ~Robert Cormier

Whether that desire to make my life mean something is my savior or my doom, I do not know. Yet here I am, still writing, and still speaking with my own voice as long as I have you to listen, even if it may be that you hear these words after my death. Here we are, reader, you and I. Holding hands, here on this page. ~Betsy Cornwell, Reader, I Murdered Him

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that, I am sure, is why he does it. ~Roald Dahl

I feel like I'm addicted to the printed word. ~Paula Danziger, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit)

No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. ~Charles De Lint

A word is dead/When it is said./Some say./I say it just/Begins to live/That day. ~Emily Dickinson

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? ~Emily Dickinson, 1870 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them...A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, love sit so radically that he remakes it in his image... ~Joan Didion, "In the Islands"

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ~E.L. Doctorow

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, and the most patient of teachers. ~Charles Eliot

You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. ~Harlan Ellison

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. ~T.S. Eliot

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page. ~Anne Enright

Writers write to be read. Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! ~Edna Ferber

Printers' ink is the greater explosive. ~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit. ~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner...you have only your emotions to sell. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. ~Neil Gaiman, intro to 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451

What I do know is that when I read poetry, good poetry, I forget to breathe and my body is suffused with something unnamable--a combination of awe and astonishment and the purest of pleasures. Reading poetry is such a thrill that I often feel like I am getting away with something. ~Roxane Gay, "Losing It"

Poetry is neither a mystery nor a symbol nor a demon. Poetry is nothing more than a lonely consolation for the owner of a sickly soul and a man of solitude. ~Sakutaro Hagiwara

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. ~Elizabeth Hardwick

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom House"

P.S. The proof-sheets will need to be revised by the author. I write such an infernal hand that this is absolutely indispensable. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter to his publisher, 1/15/1850

I think it is essential to my success as an author, to have some bitter enemies. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter to his publisher, 1/27/1851

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. ~Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. ~Ernest Hemingway

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterward it belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. ~Ernest Hemingway

The only way you're going to be a writer is to read all the time and then do it. ~S.E. Hinton

Writing is like traveling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying. ~Langston Hughes

There are always, however, general features of resemblance in the works of contemporary authors, which are not so much borrowed from each other as from the times. Writers, like bees, toll their sweets in the wide world; they incorporate with their own conceptions the anecdoets and thoughts current in society; and thus each generation has some features in common, characteristic of the age in which it lives. ~Washington Irving, "A Royal Poet"

There's something about the large, clunky, medieval device that appeals to the aspiring writers among us; they make you feel more connected to your work. When a story is done and has been pulled off the roller, you can still feel it in your fingers. ~Nicholas Jackson

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were...All you have to do--and watch this carefully, please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you. ~Shirley Jackson

I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words. ~Shirley Jackson

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. ~Shirley Jackson

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt. ~Henry James

I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object. ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, June 10, 1815

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. ~June Jordan

People often reach for poetry in moments of emotional urgency. We want a poem to read at a wedding because it feels like regular language isn't enough, or we want a poem to read at a funeral. And I think the instinct people sometimes have to reach for poetry is the instinct to reach for a reassurance that what you are feeling is something someone else has also felt, and perhaps they found language for those moments when you're struggling to find language. ~Sarah Kay

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world. ~John Keats

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. ~Jack Kerouac

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being. ~Ursula K. LeGuin

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour write, write, write. ~Madeline L'Engle

We read to know we are not alone. ~C.S. Lewis

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them. ~Clarice Lispector

Don't dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. ~Jack London, "Getting Into Print"

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. ~Audre Lorde

History belongs to she who holds the pen...If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told. ~Julianne Malveaux

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. ~Alberto Manguel

Write. You write. That's the only way. You keep writing and if you have any talent at all, which of course is a necessity, you will get better and better as you write. But you got to keep writing. You should not go to those classes or seminars or sit around some guru and talk literature. You'll never get anywhere that way. It's pleasant. It's enjoyable, but the only thing a writing class has to offer is that you have to write. You should instill that in yourself. Be persistent and constantly write in whatever field that appeals to you most. You've got to keep writing. That's the only answer. ~Richard Matheson

Artists have to take a dive, and either you hit your head on a rock and it splits your skull, and you die, or that blow to your head is so inspiring that you come back up and you do the best work you ever did. But--you have to take the dive. ~Herman Melville

Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened, and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language. ~W.S. Merwin

He who understands everything about his subject cannot write it. I write as much to discover as to explain. ~Arthur Miller, "Death of a Salesman" notebook

The most solid materials perish, as do the mightiest thoughts. And the greatest book ever written can convey only a tiny fragment of the artist's real emotion. No, we are only building tombs for posterity to admire with our words. We are trying to record the changing ego, but the self will not be revealed thus. We are only throwing off sparks. ~Henry Miller, letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1939)

We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. ~Anaïs Nin

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you. ~Anaïs Nin, commencement address

Often, on returning to my studio at midnight, I would stand at the table and register in this celestial sort of ledger the innumerable little items which constitute a writer's bookkeeping: dreams, plans of attack and defense, rememberances, titles of books I intended to write, names and addresses of potential creditors, obsessive phrases, editors to harry, battlefields, monuments, monastic retreats, and so on. ~Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world. ~Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

She carried a notebook with her everywhere and brimmed with ideas. She often woke in the night and switched on the light to scribble down her thoughts. ~Josephine Moon, The Tea Chest

The key component is not the quality of the materials--what's needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication. ~Haruki Murakami

All I need is a sheet of paper/and something to write with, and then/I can turn the world upside down. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die from the truth. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. ~Anaïs Nin

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. ~Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say. ~Flannery O'Connor

Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory. ~Susan Orlean

It had always been my habit--privately I felt it to be an ecstasy--to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind--I suppose in my isolation--I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends. ~Cynthia Ozick

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow." ~Cesare Pavese

Books are like truth serum--if you don't read, you can't tell what's real. ~Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. ~Fernando Pessoa

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've just got to burn away the peripherals. ~Sylvia Plath

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time. ~Sylvia Plath

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. ~David Quaimen

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. ~Jean Rhys

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions. ~J.D. Salinger, "Teddy"

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. ~Carl Sandburg

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane. ~W.G. Sebald

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive, and either you hit your head on a rock and it splits your skull and you die, or, that blow to your head is so inspiring that you come back up and you do the best work you ever did. But--you have to take the dive. And you do not know what the result will be. ~Maurice Sendak

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos: the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. ~Mary Shelley, introduction to th third edition of Frankenstein

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. ~Percy Shelley

It is better to write than die." ~Patti Smith, "The Writer's Song"

I am going to get coffee and go through the excruciating void and hopefully write something of worth. ~Patti Smith, interview in Harper's Bazaar, 11/28/22

I wondered how in hell I'd got myself mixed up in a project that couldn't be carried out. It was like starting to write a novel. When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing. ~John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. ~Harriet Beecher Stowe

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. ~Susan Sontag

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. ~Paul Theroux

Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us. ~Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide

I fell in love--that is the only expression I can think of--at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. ~Dylan Thomas

When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~Mark Twain

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. ~Kurt Vonnegut

I have no scepter, but I have a pen. ~Voltaire

All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being. ~Kurt Vonnegut

No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1,000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction--a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. ~Anne Waldman

A story doesn't have to appeal to the heart; it can also appeal to the spine. Sometimes you want your heart to be warmed, and sometimes you want your spine to tingle. ~Orson Welles

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. ~Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people--people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. ~E.B. White

All words are spiritual--nothing is more spiritual than words. ~Walt Whitman, An American Primer

What beauty there is in words! What a lurking curious charm in the sound some words! ~Walt Whitman

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbed it. ~Walt Whitman

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems. ~Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prety to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified. ~C. D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions. ~Matthew Zapruder