Literature

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

“For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose –”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

“A writer's vocation is a strange one, because it is a vocation that is exercised against the world, against the current, and that is why it is a form of rebellion.”

“Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to awaken, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a state of constant dissatisfaction with themselves.”

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”

“Writing is making sense of life.”

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”