"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898 "
— Mark Twain

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Poems are never finished - just abandoned"
— Wordsworth

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
— Matthew Arnold (from "Dover Beach")