Attributed to Picasso | When art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but that when painters get together they talk about where can you get the best turpentine. |
| And so it is with writers: When they gather, they do not discuss literary theory, they discuss the mechanics of writing. |
Attributed to Michelangelo | Art is never finished, only abandoned. |
| Many times writers wished they had written a provision differently. |
Christopher Hitchens | The one unforgivable sin is to be boring. |
| A thought that writers should often reference. |
attributed to Mark Twain | Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. |
| There is much to be said for this. |
Samuel Johnson | No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. |
| And all writers try to avoid being blockheads. |
Alexander Pope | What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d |
| When despairing of writing new ideas, recall there is great merit in writing an old thought well. |
yours truly | Prose is simply bad poetry. |
| Truly, I am not usually this cynical. Still, it indicates that good prose has a bit of poetry woven into it. |
Earnest Hemmingway | The writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand. |
| This applies to characters and sometimes to events. |
Pablo Picasso | Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…. |
| What we write is artifice, a story with selected elements, not actual life. |
yours truly | We are all unreliable narrators. |
| When we tell stories about ourselves or others, we omit, embellish and forget. |