"Good prose should be transparent, like a windowpane."
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
Joan Didion on why she writes
“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.”
Gertrude Stein on the countries of writers
“After all everybody, that is everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”
Anna Akhmatova on drama
“Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.”
June Jordan on ways to worry words
"There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.”
Yeats on essential quarrel
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on beauty
"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly meets its end."
Max Ernst on juxtaposition
“Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.”
Robert Frost on discovery
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. But another distinction I made is: however sad, no grievance, grief without grievance."
E. B. White on sound
“Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.”
Virginia Woolf on style
“Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”
Mahatma Gandhi on freedom
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
Socrates on happiness
"The secret to happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."
A Swedish proverb
"Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; love more, and all good things will be yours."
Albert Einstein on simplicity
"Out of clutter find simplicity; from discord find harmony; in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
Antoine de St.-Exupéry on perfection
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing to take away."
Confucius on editing
"The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."