“I want someone who will love all those pieces of me, who will know that when I write, I bleed across pages, I open my mind and let it run and run and run.”— Marisa Donnelly, thoughtcatalog.com
“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”— James Agee, amazon.com
“Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what…”— David Shields, amazon.com
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”— Joan Didion, amazon.com
“Instead of asking “how’d you get that,” say, “Wow. You must’ve worked so hard to get that.”— Sara Benincasa, sarabenincasa.tumblr.com
“The world does not care if you write or not, so to be successful you have to be so good that your work is better than all the other available distractions.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, buzzfeed.com
“The best filter isn’t BuzzFeed, or The Atlantic, or whatever. The best filter is money. That is how you say “I love you.” This is America. This is a capitalist country. We say “I’m sorry” with money. We say “I love you” with money.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, buzzfeed.com
“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people.”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.com
“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren…”— Lena Dunham, amazon.com
“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is no…”— Bianca Sparacino, amazon.com
“Poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.”— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com
“Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.”— Marcel Proust, amazon.com
“These visions, these auditions, this process of driving words from one end of the universe to the other, it is delirium.”— Gilles Deleuze, amazon.com
“It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantuan, preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.”— Jack Kerouac, amazon.com
“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.”— Annette Messager, goodreads.com
“Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.”— Randy Pausch, goodreads.com
“Here’s my advice for anybody out there who is creative and scared: Shout until they fucking hear you. And then shout even louder.”— Chris Gethard, youtube.com