Artifice Quote by Ambrose Bierce

“Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not…

— John Kennedy Toole

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and…

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general…

— E. B. White

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener…

— Blaise Pascal

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an…

— Benjamin Disraeli

“All forms of creative thinking involve a struggle to conquer or master something, and usually that specific something eludes us completely. A personal essayist…

— Kilroy J. Oldster

The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her…

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must…

— Flora Thompson

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

— Anonymous

“When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there's a part of…

— Hannah Strom-Martin

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even -…

— Randall Jarrell