“Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.”
Alden Nowlan
“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
Woody Allen
“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences”
Anatole France
“Wealth and poverty: the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent”
Plato
“Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.”
Voltaire
“At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world (to be published). You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.”
Walter Mosley
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