• Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. – Leonardo da Vinci
• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  – Anaïs Nin
• Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  – E.L. Doctorow
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. – Pablo Picasso
• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  - William Wordsworth
• An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time. – Charles Baudelaire
• If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.  - Isaac Asimov
• The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man 
ought not to be. The future is what artists are. – Oscar Wilde
• There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. – Ernest Hemingway
• The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. – Ralph Ellison
• Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Plato
• If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison
• The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.  ~Mark Twain
• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.  ~William Wordsworth
• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov
• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.  ~Mark Twain
• The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.  ~Jules Renard
• A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.  ~Karl Kraus
• I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.  ~James Michener
• Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.  ~ Jeb Dickerson
• Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.  ~Catherine Drinker Bowen
• To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.  ~Truman Capote
• Write down the thoughts of the moment.  Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.  ~Francis Bacon
• Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we?  ~Terri Guillemets
• What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.  ~Burton Rascoe
• The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie
• Writers are not just people who sit down and write.  They hazard themselves.  Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.  ~E.L. Doctorow
• You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you.  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.  ~Arthur Polotnik
• It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.  ~Sinclair Lewis
• An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.  ~Gustave Flaubert
• If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams.  ~Terri Guillemets
• A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.  ~Jean Luc Godard
• Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.  ~James Norman Hall
• Writing is a product of silence.  ~Carrie Latet
• Books want to be born: I never make them.  They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.  ~Samuel Butler

Ink surrounds me all the time
On my bed sheets, recorded in rhyme
Quills ‘ever scribbling in my head
Sometimes damnit I forget what they said.
Ink has settled into my fingerprints
But to keep the words I fear to rinse…
~Terri Guillemets

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