"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
"
— Joseph Heller

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Courage is grace under pressure."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
— Ernest Hemingway

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. "
— Herman Melville

"In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"...for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and sadly need mending."
— Herman Melville

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Truman Capote

"More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."
— Truman Capote (Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel)

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."
— Truman Capote

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
— Truman Capote

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
— Edith Wharton

"They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything."
— Edith Wharton

"Silence may be as variously shaded as speech."
— Edith Wharton

"...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them."
— Robert Penn Warren

"The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world."
— Robert Penn Warren

""It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another.""
— Robert Penn Warren

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."
— John Updike (A Month of Sundays)

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation."
— John Updike

"You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
— John Updike

"It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. "
— D.H. Lawrence

"ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions."
— D.H. Lawrence

"ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."
— D.H. Lawrence

"“Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved.”"
— D. H. Lawrence

""Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.""
— D.H. Lawrence

"For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done."
— D.H. Lawrence

"Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions."
— D.H. Lawrence (Women In Love)

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
— Leo Tolstoy