A baker's dozen of reflections on the literary art

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long. Leonard Bernstein

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. Oscar Wilde

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

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. Samuel Johnson

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. T S Eliot

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there. Thomas Berger

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. E L Doctorow

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Vita Sackville-West

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. James Michener

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. Isaac Bashevis Singer

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. H G Wells

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.   Daphne du Maurier

http:/www.pilgrimrose.com