History Quote by William Godwin

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two…

— Enrique Vila-Matas

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

— Horace

For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my…

— Diane Setterfield

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do…

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.”

— Thucydides

“After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.”

— Dan Simmons

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I shall omit former particulars, and begin with informing the Reader, that, in 1792, I was strangely visited, by day and night, concerning what…

— Joanna Southcott

It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To…

— Mary Oliver

“In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment…

— Umberto Eco

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

— John Steinbeck

I devoted myself to writing for years without representation or a promise of anything. And there were times when I felt quite down about…

— Geoffrey S. Fletcher