Acquaintance Quote by Honore de Balzac

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For…

— Robert Stone

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius inan essentially common personis detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality…

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr

“For as we would wish that a painter who is to draw a beautiful face, in which there is yet some imperfection, should neither…

— Plutarch

In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak…

— Samuel Johnson

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

— Louis Auchincloss

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

— Charles Churchill

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I…

— Ariana Reines

The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.

— John Hawkes

The rust of the mind is the destruction of genius.

— Seneca the Younger

“It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Lady Windemere's Fan 23. In naïve, or pure,…

— Susan Sontag

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many…

— Criss Jami

“people cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It”

— Richard Russo