After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

- George Ade (1866 - 1944)

Everywhere I go,I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

- Flannery O'Connor

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style

- Sydney Smith

Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

- James McAvoy as Tom LeFroy in Becoming Jane. (Tom is listening to Jane read and getting bored...)

There is no such thing as a short poetry reading

- Mrs Seamus Heaney

The poet of the people nowhere occupies himself with casting about for a fine subject; he writes of what he feels and what he sees.

- Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, The Study of European Folk Songs

Wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns as 'small-pox', 'pony', or 'boots and shoes', at once arrested her.

- George Eliot: Janet's Repentance

Whenever a novel starts with the character of a writer sitting in a Hampstead kitchen. struggling to finish a novel, I throw the book straight in the bin

- Mark Ravenhill: The Guardian

People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches.

- Kenneth Patchen

My sixteenth transatlantic crossing under full sail was fairly uneventful, with the exception of glancing off a basking whale about six hundred miles to the east of Bermuda.

- Tristan Jones, The Incredible Voyage

It would amuse the thoughtful and intelligent, but from a business point of view that portion of the public is never worth considering.

- J K Jerome: Three Men on the Bummel

Es bringt Poeterey zwar nicht viel Geld ins Haus.
Das drinnen aber ist, das wirft sie auch nicht raus.

- Friedrich von Logau