"Give me my typewriter and my dictionary, and just let me suffer!"
— Robertson Davies
"Writing is at the mercy of the largest number of amateurs—almost the entire population."
— Jacques Barzun
"When a writer thinks of his readers, common sense will tell him that a few of them will certainly not be his intellectual equals, but that the majority will be so, and that there will be some who are greatly his superiors; he should comport himself like a gentleman toward all of them."
— Robertson Davies
"[I]f you ask me as an artist what I came into this world to do, I, an artist, would say, I came to live out loud."
— Actress Viola Davis, quoting Émile Zola
"You can't spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them."
— Christian Wiman
"Nearly every fiction writer in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."
— Roald Dahl
"I put everything I have into whatever I'm doing or thinking about at the moment. So it's not right when people say I'm self-absorbed. I think I'm just absorbed."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation