"You can't help but remember what Faulkner is alleged to have said when asked whether he wrote daily or only when the inspiration hit him. It's said he replied that he wrote only when the inspiration came, but that he made sure it came every morning at ten o'clock sharp when he sat down at his desk."
- Rick Bass

"And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the "real" world--rock, bone, wood, ice--and elements of the real--not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself--inside stories and tales and dreams. You write a sentence about a hawk's swooping on a swallow and have no sooner finished it and looked up than you see feathers falling from the sky."
- Rick Bass

"Writing is both hard labor and one of the most pleasant forms that fanaticism can take. I take infinite care in how a sentence sounds to me."
- Pat Conroy

"All writers are both devotees and prisoners of their childhoods, and of the images that accrued during those early days on earth when each of us played out the mystery of Adam and Eve in our own way."
- Pat Conroy

"I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write."
- Pat Conroy

"Tell me a story" still comprise four of the most powerful words in English, words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself."
- Pat Conroy

"I gather stories the way a lepidopterist hoards his chloroformed specimens of rare moths, or a sunburned entomologist admires his well-ordered bottles of Costa Rican Beetles. Stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself. I am often called a "storyteller" by flippant and unadmiring critics. I revel in the title. I bathe in the lotions and unguents of that sweet word."
- Pat Conroy

"From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire."
- Pat Conroy

"A novel is the greatest act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess, that a human being can pull off in one lifetime."
- Pat Conroy

(I write to find) the proof for myself, of Mark Doty's observation about the shaping forces of one's life "becoming the lens through which you see as opposed to the thing at which you are looking."
- Amy Hempel

"I have stood a story on its head and started at the end. Galliano is shown putting a leather biker jacket on a pale blond Ukrainian bride. I have dressed a delicate subject in hard, tough prose. And the reverse: described in lyrical language something ugly, something bad. Used a genteel voice to describe violence, an angry voice to take on the harmless. I mix leather and lace on the page."
- Amy Hempel

"Upon leaving Europe, I resigned my commission with the aim of becoming a writer. It was the most difficult act of my life. Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."
- James Salter

"Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known."
- André Breton

"A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light."
- Joy Williams

"...a gift avoided and unexercised is deep trouble indeed."
- Will Blythe

"It really is out there though. It really happens doesn't it. And we can lie here like we're helpless, like we're no help. We can say it's a shame and call it a night.

But really..."
- Michael Wilson

"Well, I dare not allow myself any illusions, and I am afraid it may never happen that Father and Mother will really appreciate my art. It is not their fault; we do not see the same things with the same eyes, or have the same thoughts raised in us by them. They will never be able to understand what painting is."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"Carlyle rightly says, 'Blessed is he who has found his work.' I think a painter is happy because he is in harmony with nature as soon as he can express a little of what he sees. And that's a great thing; one knows what one has to do, there are subjects in abundance. If that work strives to bring peace, like that of Millet, then it is doubly stimulating--one is also less alone, because one thinks: It's true I'm sitting here lonely, but whilst I am sitting here and keeping silent, my work perhaps speaks to my friend, and whoever sees it will not suspect me of being heartless."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"How miserable are those "dregs" of the work, the depression after overexertion! Life has then the colour of dishwater; it becomes something like an ash-heap. On such days one would like to have the company of a friend; that sometimes clears up the leaden mist. In spite of this, I have been working on a water-color..."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"It often happens that I feel so downhearted when people are hostile and indifferent that I lose all courage. Then I cheer up again, and go back to my work and laugh at it. And working, I believe that there is indeed hope for me in the future, though I do not feel it, for I tell you there is no space left in my brain to philosophize about the future, either to upset or to comfort myself. To stick to the present and not let it pass without drawing some profit from it, that's what I think duty is. ...let us perservere as far as we can rather today than tomorrow."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim--and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly--a reason the more to lose no time."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things, of which I happen to repent, more or less, afterwards. Now and then I speak and act too quickly, when it would have been better to wait patiently. I think other people sometimes commit the same imprudences. Well, this being the case, what must be done? Must I consider myself a dangerous man, incapable of anything? I do not think so. But the question is to try by all means to put those selfsame passions to a good use. For instance, I have more or less irresistible passion for books, and I want continually to instruct myself, just as much as I want to eat my bread. When I was in the surroundings of pictures and things of art, I then had a violent passion for them that reached the highest pitch of enthusiasm. And I do not repent it..."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good--it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"The figure of a labourer--some furrows in a ploughed field--a bit of sand, sea and sky--are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote ones life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"And then Uncle Cor asked me if I should feel no attraction for a beautiful woman or girl, but I told him I should feel more attraction for, and should rather come into contact with one who was ...old, or poor, or in some way unhappy, but who through experience and sorrow had gained a mind and a soul."
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo

"There is a just-caught fish on somebody's dock, and there are people inside listening to nothing while the windows bay at the dogs outside and there is you, but you're not home."
- Michael Wilson, Heads Bowed Eyes Closed, No One Looking Around

"Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.--And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses--would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?"
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"It must be blind love."
- Tom Waits

"With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"...the last of the human freedoms: to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances."
- Viktor Frankl

"We thought you was a toad."
- Coen Brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou

"Do not seek the treasure."
- Coen Brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou

"Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now."
- Viktor Frankl

It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.
Spanish Proverb

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
- Dogen

List of essentials:
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening.
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow.
24. No fear of shame in the dignity of yr experience, language, & knowledge.
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven.
- Jack Kerouac

"Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."
- Elrond, from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"

"if you like my poems let them walk in the evening,a little behind you" (sic)
- e. e. cummings

"We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people.

Yes, the highest things are beyond words.

That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something highter. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions."
- Ben Okri, "Beyond Words", A Way of Being Free

"If you've never seen a good time, How would you recognise one?"
- Sinéad O'Connor

"They ate by turns from the same fork, and she drank wine from his mouth. He caressed her until her soul groaned within her body, and she worshipped him... But she thought to herself: "The moments of my life are dying like flies gulped down by fish. How can I make them nourishment for his hunger?"
- Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, as quoted in The Ravenous Muse

"To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. Even someone as grim and unsentimental as Samuel Beckett, with his lunatics in garbage cans or up to their necks in sand, whose lives consist of pawing through the contents of their purses, stopping to marvel at each item, gives us great insight into what is true, into what helps. He gets it right--that we're born astride the grave and that this planet can feel as cold and uninhabitable as the moon--and he knows how to make it funny. He smiles an oblique and private smile at us, the most delicious smile of all, and this changes how we look at life. A few small things seem suddenly clear, things to which we can cling, and this makes us feel like part of the solution. (But perhaps we have the same problem with the word solution as we do with the word moral. It sounds so fixative, and maybe we have gone beyond fixing. Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor.)"
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"If Rebecca was here I would tell her that the pink Jasmine is blooming again. I would tell her that I felt afraid to ride my bike home from Daniel's house last night & didn't tell him. I wanted to be embraced and smooched & tickled and wonderfully whispered to by him but I wasn't. I held back. I couldn't relax. It was that kind of holding back that I don't even know what I'm witholding--and I just didn't know why I felt so crumbly. I pretended to be asleep so I wouldn't have to deal with that awkward silence."
- Sabrina Ward Harrison, Spilling Open

"I try to create as much as I can with my heart, in the brotherhood of the heart."
- Marc Chagall

"Anyhow:from my standpoint the only thing--if you're some sort of artist--is to work a little harder than you can at being who you are:while if you're an unartist(i.e. aren't)nothing but big&quick recognition matters." (sic)
- E. E. Cummings, September 7, 1959, from a letter to his daughter.

"We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely."
- Rainer Maria Rilke

"The man at the gate smiled and waved as I drove past, as if I had nothing to do with the killing."
- Michael Wilson

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."
- Willa Cather

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."
- C.G. Jung

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak."
- G. K. Chesterton

"What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by its content rather than its quantity--happy times and sad times, the time the rabbit bit your finger, the time you had your first taste of bananas and cream, the time you were crying yourself to sleep when somebody came and lay down beside you in the dark for comfort. Childhood's time is Adam and Eve's time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after. It is the time before God told them that the day would come when they would surely die with the result that from that point on they made clocks and calendars for counting their time out like money and never again lived through a day of their lives without being haunted somewhere in the depths of them by the knowledge that each day brought them closer to the end of their lives."
- Frederick Buechner

"Making a decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."
- Elizabeth Stone

"No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought."
- C.S. Lewis

"All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined... to the cruel radiance of what is."
- James Agee

"I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones. This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say."
- Brenda Ueland

"But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature."
- Flannery O'Connor

"Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
- William Blake

"So this is love. This is winter in whimtown. This is a bunch of people wanting to be wanted by a bunch of people who don't know what they want."
- Michael Wilson

"What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall."
- Annie Dillard

"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."
- Teilhard de Chardin

"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."
- Kahlil Gibran

"The meaning of a word to me is not as exact as the meaning of a color."
- Georgia O'Keefe

"The wild poem is a substitute for the woman one loves or ought to love, one wild rhapsody a fake for another."
- Michael Ondaatje

"In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon."
- Malcolm Muggeridge

"It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatross, potentials unknowingly murdered."
- Ben Okri