Dan > Dan's Quotes

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.”
― Georges Simenon

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

“I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.”
― Honore de Balzac

“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
― Martin Amis

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.”
― Henry Miller

“To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.”
― William Golding

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”
― Ernest Hemingway