Literary Lobotomies

“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

“You should be writing about things that surprise you.” - Joyce Carol Oates

“You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?” - William Zinsser

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.” - E.B. White

“Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” - T.S Eliot

“The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.” - Alexander Woollcott

“I suspect there are some writers who never read anything by Franz Kafka, but they brazenly use the term “kafkaesque” because they’ve seen other writers use that term, and they want to look smart, too.” - Peter DeArmond

“I am a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.” - Edgar Allan Poe

“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paper work.” - Peter DeVries

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.” - Dorothy Parker

“I am about to – or I am going to – die. Either expression is correct.” - Last words of French grammarian Dominique Bouhours

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” - Margaret Atwood

“Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.” - Alexander Woollcott

“There are letters of accent and letters of tone, but the best of all letters is to let her alone.” - Herman Mankiewicz

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. Anybody can have ideas — the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.” - Mark Twain

“Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.” - Robert Benchley

“There are two motivations for reading a book; one is that you enjoy it and the other is that you can brag about.” - Bertrand Russell

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” - Franz Kafka

“It takes two years to learn to speak, and 60 to learn how to keep quiet.” - Ernest Hemingway

“When I read, no one is after me. When I read, I am the one who is chasing, chasing after God.” - from the movie, The Professor and the Madman

“The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats.”- Dorothy Parker

“It seems to me that some allegedly brilliant writers filled with Ivy League enlightenment rely too much on foreign words and phrases like raison d’être.  They want you to know they are well-educated, for that is their main purpose - sorry, I mean their raison d’être. There should be a special place for them in Writers’ Hell, if you will excuse my Schadenfreude.”- Peter DeArmond

“He had delusions of adequacy.” - Walter Kerr

“I’m writing a sequel to my self-help book on how to avoid self-help books: Ten More Steps to Understand the Reasons to Avoid Self-Help Books.” - Peter DeArmond

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas

“I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” - Oscar Wilde 

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.”   - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.” - Winston Churchill, in response

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.” - Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” - Mark Twain

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde 

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.” - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh's ear for music.” - Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it.” - Groucho Marx

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln

“There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." - Jack E.  Leonard

“They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." -  Thomas Brackett Reed

“To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.” - Anne Rice

“All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.” - Alexander Woollcott

“The poet excused himself from the dinner party because he had to go to the bathroom, saying, ‘I’ve got to onomatopoeia.’ ” - Peter DeArmond

“Uhland’s poetry is like the famous war horse, Bayard; it possesses all possible virtues, and only one fault: it is dead.” - Heinrich Heine

“He writes his plays for the ages – the ages between five and 12.” - George Jean Nathan

“H.L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H.L. Mencken – there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.” - Maxwell Bodenheim

“This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.” - Dorothy Parker

“His more ambitious works may be defined as careless thinking carefully versified.” - James Lowell, writing about Alexander Pope

“James Joyce, an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.” - Tom Stoppard

“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” - Desiderius Erasmus

“When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” - Clifton Fadiman