Women. They are a complete mystery.

-Stephen Hawking

The ultimate mystery is one’s own self.

-Sammy Davis, Jr.

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

-Sherlock Holmes/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“I’ve written because it fulfilled me… I did it for the pure joy of the thing. If you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

-Stephen King

“I would not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”

-Jane Austen

“Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.”

-Charles M. Schulz

“Did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “The Class of ‘61” from Speeches (1913)

Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.

-Ambrose Bierce from “Epigrams”

“Publish and be damned.”

-Attributed to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, when the courtesan Harriette Wilson threatened to publish her memoirs and his letters

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

-Virginia Woolf from “A Room of Her Own” (1929)

“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

-Earnest Hemingway from “Winner Take Nothing” (1933) Fathers and Sons

“When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what is most important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.”

-Isaac Bashevis Singer, from About Everything, interview with Richard Burgin in The New York Times Magazine, November 26, 1978

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

-Joan Didion from “The White Album” (1979)

“I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.”

-Claes Oldenburg

“I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be—not to have a “career,” but to be that straightforward obvious, unmistakable animal, a writer.”

-Cynthia Ozick from “Metaphor and Memory”

“Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”

-Gunter Grass from “The Tin Drum”

“Where did we go right?”

-Mel Brooks from “The Producers” screenplay

“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.”

-Russell Baker from “Growing Up” (1982)

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