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

- George Ade (1866 - 1944)

If words aren't working for you, they're working against you.

- Russell Hoban

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

It is the proof of intelligence, the proof of not being a barbarian, to be able to enter into something outside of oneself, something that does not touch one's next neighbour in the city omnibus

- R L Stevenson

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Atwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

- Terry Pratchett

It seems to me that they are best fitted to criticise this story who are capable of improving on it. But be it true or not, may those enjoy it who can, and may the others find something more enjoyable to do.
And so I end my story.

- Anon, Hrolf Gautreksson's Saga

In my view, the counsel of fools is all the more dangerous, the more of them there are.

- Anon, Laxdaela Saga

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

Für die Flöh gibt es Pulver, für die Schuh gibt es Wix; für den Durst gibt es Wasser, bloß für d'Dummheit gibt's nix.

- anon

: "A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

- Ernest Hemngway

" He's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's fuck all proof for, Pajo'll believe it."

- Trevor Byrne, "Ghosts and Lightning"

"A what?" Denham was apprehensive.
"A reading circle. You all study some book together and meet and talk about it."
"What for?"

- Rose Macaulay, "Crewe Train"

"Mr Escot passed a sleepless night, the ordinary effect of love, according to some amatory poets, who seem to have composed their whining ditties for the benevolent purpose of bestowing on others that gentle slumber of which they so pathetically lament the privation."
(Headlong Hall: Thomas Love Peacock)