Best effort Quote by Anton Chekhov

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.

— Anonymous

Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed…

— Samuel Johnson

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

— Storm Jameson

I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually…

— Maya Angelou

There are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer,

— S. S. Van Dine

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

— Roy Blount, Jr

“Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very…

— Jane Austen

No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think…

— Terry Pratchett

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can…

— Scott Turow

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

— Andre Gide

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

— Jan Neruda

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way…

— Friedrich Nietzsche