Writing

When that passage was written only God and Robert Browning understood it. Now only God understands it.

Rudolf Besier.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Pearl Buck.

The original style is not the style which never borrows of any one, but that which no other person is capable of reproducing.

François-René de Chateaubriand

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

Winston Churchill

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Arthur S. Eddington

Composition is for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution.

Samuel Johnson

The impulse to create beauty is rather rare in literary men... Far ahead of it comes the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning to make a noise. 

H. L. Mencken

If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research.

Wilson Mizner

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas form each other's fur.

Logan Pearsall Simth

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Attributed to Voltaire.