“What he wanted, of course, was for me to write as much like he did as I possibly could. This is a vanity I have often noted in writers; the more eminent the writer, the more pronounced this vanity is likely to be. They believe that everyone should write as they do: not as well as they do, of course, but in the same fashion. In such a way do mountains long for foothills.”
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
 

"If I am going to do something that could be provocative or artistically relevant, I have to be prepared to put myself in a place where I feel unsafe, not completely in control. I have no fear of failure whatsoever, because often out of that uncertainty something is salvaged, something which is worthwhile comes about. There is no progress without failure. And each failure is a lesson learned: Unnecessary failures are the ones where an artist tries to second guess an audience's taste, and little comes out of that situation except a kind of inward humiliation."
- David Bowie
 

"First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
- Ray Bradbury
 

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." 
- John Cage
 

"It has always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him."
- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The public wants works which flatter its illusions.”

“Criticism occupies the lowest rung in the hierarchy of literature: as regards form, almost always, and as regards moral worth, incontestably. It’s lower even than rhyming games and acrostics, which at least demand a modicum of invention.”
- Gustave Flaubert


"But the denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
 

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."
- Victor Hugo
 

"Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make 
beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful."
- Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
 

"...the inspired vitality and tender perseverance without which passion is powerless."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Wingstroke
 

"Certainly it's all in bloom, certainly we'll go. For aren't you and I gods? . . .
 I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . . . 
Listen-I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. 
Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.
Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. 
Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. 
Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Gods
 

"But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, 
the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that 
mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government 
or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about."
- Vladimir Nabokov, A Letter That Never Reached Russia
 

"Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic."
- Jean Sibelius
 

"Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished… and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world."
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando