“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Oscar Wilde

“One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.” Oscar Wilde

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” C. S. Lewis

“Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.” Carol Burnett (1936 – )

“Maybe that’s just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it’s enough to tell a few jokes.” David Nicholls, One Day, 2010

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” Cyril Connolly (1903 – 1974)

“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937)

“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.” George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

“After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.” George Ade (1866 – 1944), “Fables in Slang”, 1899

“The cure for writer’s cramp is writer’s block.” Inigo DeLeon

“A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” Junot Diaz, O Magazine, November 2009

“The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.” Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)

“Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.” Stanislaw J. Lec (1909 – 1966), “Unkempt Thoughts”

“I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.” Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, 1996