“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”
Roland Barthes
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Charles Baudelaire
“There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.”
Elie Wiesel
“It is the sex of the novels and not of their authors that must interest us. All great novels… express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.”
Milan Kundera
“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
G. K. Chesterton
“You know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”
John McPhee (on his own habit of writing each day, but typically no more than one page)
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”
Gabriel García Márquez