Nathaniel Hawthorne
“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
Christopher Morley
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Thomas Mann
“Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.”
Larry McMurtry
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
Allen Ginsberg
“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”
Thomas Hardy
“He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.”
Raymond Chandler on Dashiell Hammett
“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”
Raymond Chandler