“It’s raining, but the air is soft, smoky, warm. Big drops patter on the languid leaves, the tobacco flowers lean over. I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books, beautiful external life to watch and ponder—no more.”— Katherine Mansfield, amazon.com
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”— Hermann Hesse, amazon.com
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”— Albert Camus, goodreads.com
“That is the ultimate project for me—figuring out how language can perform this same kind of trick that music does.”— John Edgar Wideman, theparisreview.org
“I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.”— Johnny Cash, www1.cbn.com
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”— Jorge Luis Borges, theguardian.com
“Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.”— Anne Carson, goodreads.com
“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warne…”— David Mitchell, amazon.com