Character Quote by William Somerset Maugham

“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at…

— Gustave Flaubert

“I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not…

— Mary Shelley

“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others,…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful.”

— Douglas Bond

“If they succeed, you will not be packed off to some idyllic farm, where you can write bad poetry, we will both be executed.”

— A. H. Septimius

“A story is like a nut. A fool will swallow it whole and choke. A fool will throw it away, think it of little…

— Patrick Rothfuss

“Jokes are to be enjoyed, not explained. Folktales are to be inspired by, not verified.”

— Nauman Faridi

“yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy,…

— Sherman Alexie

“Poetry can have varied and useful functions; and seduction is apparently something worth writing poetry for.”

— Shira Wolosky

“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.”

— Patricia Fuller

“Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.”

— Norman O. Brown

“The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden…

— W. Somerset Maugham