Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but…

“You're smiling. But you must know yourself, since you are a literary person, that the work of fiction is always a form of recovery…

— Raymond Federman

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

— John Grisham

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

— Fernando Pessoa

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well…

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Write what you know. Write what you can't forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope.”

— Nikki Rosen

“Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of…

— Fernando Pessoa

Some people write to remember, some people write to forget.

— Needa Muy

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts…

— Fernando Pessoa

“To write, I need to remember, but I write to forget. I drink to forget, then get nostalgic when I’m drunk.”

— Shoshaku Jushaku

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“Write like you can forget, write and forget. Hold an entire world in your palm then puff. Pierluigi Cappello”

— Claudia Serrano

If I don't read, I get lonely. If I don't write, I forget who I am.

— Jack Driscoll

“that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition…. "Then”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes…

— Helen Vendler

We have a great literary tradition in Australia. I think the book is very much alive and the more people who are encouraged to…

— George Brandis