Member my old commonplace book? Here are a ton more. Many of them are writers either talking about their writing, or commenting on other writers. I feel I should say this: whether or not I agree with the sentiments of the quotes is irrelevant to me. It's the quote ITSELF I am interested in. [For example: I agree with all of the quotes bad-mouthing James. I hate James. But I am also highly interested in the opinions of those who found him brilliant. It's all good to me. It's all part of learning more about life, and writing, and people.] I feel I have to say this because when I've posted such quotes before, some readers get defensive - like: "Hey! I love Henry James!" or whatever - some tiresome remark like that. The quotes are not endorsements one way or the other. I like the quotes because they are a montage of artistic comments ... it's a jigsaw-puzzle of responses, and reading over them make me feel alive. They make me remember my own intellectual curiosity, my own ambitions ... and they make me love (all over again) people who READ. People who inquire, and love, and hate things strongly. This is why I keep those quotes.
My commonplace book is to remind me never to stop questioning, never to think, "There. Now I'm DONE".
It helps keep me in the conversation.
I hope you enjoy the quotes - I hope they make you think, or make you laugh (some very funny ones!!) God bless Oscar Wilde and his wit!
Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?
Thank you!
Thomas Lanier Williams
-- Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933
Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.
-- Charles Dickens, letter to reader, Dec. 27, 1866
Had I been a passionate man ... we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H.M. Minster and she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert.
-- Harold Nicholson, diary entry, Dec. 24, 1933 - on his marriage to Vita Sackville-West
I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.
-- Mark Twain, 1871
The works of [Samuel] Richardson ... are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher.
-- Horace Walpole, 1764
Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
-- Emily Dickinson
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
-- James Thurber
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.
-- Willa Cather
I have no more right to the name of a poet than a maker of mousetraps has to that of an engineer.
-- William Cowper
It resembles nothing that I know of, and reminds me of everything I admire.
-- Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way"
Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself.
-- Ford Madox Ford on Jack London, 1916
It is curious how vanity helps keep the successful man and wrecks the failure. In old days half of my strength was my vanity.
-- Oscar Wilde letter to friend following Wilde's release from jail, Nov. 16, 1897
His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
-- Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
-- Fran Lebowitz
I don't mind what the opposition say of me, so long as they don't tell the truth.
-- Mark Twain, 1880
The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
-- TS Eliot, 1950
Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand ....
-- William Blake, letter to William Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804
It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.
-- Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle
Lord Sandwich: "Wilkes, you will die of a pox or the gallows."
John Wilkes: "That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress or your lordship's principles."
To write adequately one must know, above all, how bad are one's first drafts.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
I'm a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.
-- Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, Oct. 11, 1917
Some drunk dame told [James Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim said, "Surely you don't by unartificial insemination!"
-- Nunnally Johnson, letter to Groucho Marx, Oct. 9 1961
Thomas Hardy taught me to like Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe taught me about those 'Mimes in the form of God on high, blind prophets that come and go.'
--John Cowper Powys
I'm writing my third autobiography. The other two were premature.
-- Louis Untermeyer, said on his 90th birthday
It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.
-- Albert Camus, Sept. 30, 1937
For my part I keep the Commandments, I love my neighbour as my selfe, and to avoid Coveting my neighbour's wife I desire to be covered by her; which you know is quite another thing.
-- William Congreve, Sept 27, 1700
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
-- Red Smith
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896
[I am working on] a poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades, unless it becomes a bore.
-- Ezra Pound, 1915
I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first.
-- Katherine Anne Porter
I don't play golf, am not a joiner. I vote Democrat, read as much as my eyes will stand, and work at my trade day in and day out. When I can find nothing better to do, I write.
-- William Carlos Williams
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley
The possessor of a brilliant and almost inimitable prose style, and of scarcely any ideas at all.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Sherwood Anderson
The most complete example of human symbiosis I have ever seen.
-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Well, I hope they understand one another - nobody else would.
-- Wordsworth, 1846 - musing on the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual; all of it is myself.
-- James Joyce, letter to Nora, Sept. 7 1909
In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and where it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.
-- William Saroyan, preface to "Time of Your Life"
I am earnest, terribly earnest. Carlyle bending over the history of Frederick the Great was a mere trifle, a volatile butterfly, in comparison.
-- Joseph Conrad to critic Edward Garnelt
I am following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
-- Dorothy Parker
The fictional Christophr Robin ... and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms ... In pessimistic moments ... it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders.
-- Christopher Milne, son of AA Milne
The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison.
-- Robert Browning on his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1871
The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.
-- Samuel Pepys, diary, Aug. 12 1665 - during the plague
He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did.
-- Auden on Tennyson
First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry ... Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift.
-- Virginia Woolf on Christina Rossetti, journal entry, Aug 5 1918
I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist.
-- Harold Nicolson after a reading by Auden
[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of the brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.
-- Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935
If I could I would work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
-- Emily Bronte
He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.
-- Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw
What a commonplace genius he has; or a genius for the commonplace.
-- DH Lawrence on Thomas Hardy, 1928
I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.'
-- Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf
You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe, who was struggling over his revisions of "Of Time and the River"
When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.
-- Ernest Hemingway
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
-- James Thurber, 1955
[Henry] James felt buried in America; but he came here to be embalmed.
-- George Bernard Shaw on Henry James becoming a British subject
... this voluble Jack-of-all-Trades ... this carnivorous vegetarian.
-- NY Times critic on George Bernard Shaw, 1898
He is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.
-- Queen Victoria, journal entry - 2 days after the death of Charles Dickens, June 11, 1870
The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.
-- TS Eliot, letter to Groucho Marx, June 3, 1964
A most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affection, and downright nonsense.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
I could readily see in Emerson ... the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
-- Herman Melville
Her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Jane Austen
A delicious little old dandy ... Much of what he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery.
-- Evelyn Waugh on Max Beerbohm, 1947
... rather ill and rather American ... But by no means to be sniffed at.
-- Lytton Strachey on TS Eliot, May 14, 1919
... a purge, at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.
-- Daphne du Maurier on writing a book
I heard TS Eliot read his poems the other night ... He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw.
-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos, May 11, 1933
For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
-- James M. Barrie, 1888
It really is most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more ... than an arabesque --- an exquisite arabesque, of course.
-- Lytton Strachey, 1927, on "To the Lighthouse"
Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.
-- Nora Joyce, letter to Jimmy, 1940
"Yes, that's a good one, and tomorrow I shall be telling it on the Golden Floor."
-- A.E. Houseman, 1936 - he was on his deathbed, and his doctor told him a dirty joke. This was Houseman's response
"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. "Arms and the Man", opening night - unanimous cheers and hullaballoo - Shaw goes up onto the stage to take his bow. As he does so - ONE man boos. And the quote above was Shaw's response to the boo-er.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
-- Oscar Wilde
I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, and it's splendid.
-- Thornton Wilder on his 70th birthday
Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new, but that is enough.
-- Eudora Welty
I hereby formally bequeath you to the female vagina, which vortex will inevitably receive you with or without my permission.
-- Tennessee Williams, letter to Kip Kiernan - a man he loved who just left him for a woman, August 22, 1940
His abiding complex and the source of much of his misery was that he was not a 6 foot all, extremely handsome and rich duke.
-- Cecil Beaton on Evelyn Waugh
In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good', abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.
-- Bertrand Russell
I don't go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.
-- Charles Dickens
Whether children will find anything amusing in it, only time will tell.
-- EB White to his editor Cass Canfield, on the manuscript of "Charlotte's Web"
Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him GREAT.
-- Samuel Johnson on Thomas Gray, 1775
For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am lookt upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England.
-- John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 1728 - after "Beggar's Opera" opened
... the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting ... is denied to me.
-- Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen, 1826