Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.

Nick Tosches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Tosches

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Raymond Chandler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler

Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.

Maya Angelou

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou

Detail

I was watching a robin fly after a finch – the smaller bird

chirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent

in light-winged earnest chase – when, out of nowhere

over the chimneys and the shivering front gardens,

flashes a sparrowhawk headlong a light brown burn

scorching the air from which it simply plucks

like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three

cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence

closing over the empty street when the birds have gone

about their own business, and I began to understand

how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small

elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth

strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.

Eamon Grennan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_Grennan

What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson

Moments

Clear moments are so short.

There is much more darkness. More

ocean than firm land. More

shadow than form.

Adam Zagajewski

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Zagajewski

Proofs

Death will not correct

a single line of verse

she is no proof-reader

she is no sympathetic

lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died

is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death

a fool keeps up his foolish chatter

from beyond the grave.

Tadeusz Rózewicz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_R%C3%B3%C5%BCewicz

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters….You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

James Scott Bell

https://www.jamesscottbell.com/

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

François Mauriac

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mauriac