Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
-Henry David Thoreau
Quotations
Writer
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
-Karl Marx
A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
-Tom Bissell
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
-Truman Capote
"Truman Capote: Conversations"
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
-Anaïs Nin
A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.
-Nelson Mandela
The writer must be playful and serious at the same time.
-W. Somerset Maugham
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
-Ernest Hemingway
She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
-Cynthia Voigt
"When She Hollers"
