Write A Book Quotes

Becoming a writer is a lifelong journey. It cannot be learned in a day or even a month or a year. We will never fully learn all there is to know about our craft, and even if we did we wouldn't realize it. We are filled with self-doubt by nature, and many of us will work our entire lives to master the art of the written word without ever recognizing the true talent we possess. Writing is a personal journey of self-discovery and growth, and should be honored as such. If you wonder about my best writing, I would say it came without warning, in moments when I was most vulnerable - with the door shut and my heart split wide open. ~ Shanda Trofe Write From The Heart

Are you giving the same advice over and over and over again to clients, patients, pupils, interns or friends? If the answer is yes, you should probably write a book about whatever it is that you keep repeating. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

We live in the information age and the sheer volume of it being available everywhere, creates a need for information that has value. Yes, we can look anything up on Google but who has the time? Can we trust that the information comes from a trustworthy source? Your experience has given you a deep knowing of your subject matter. You have insights and ideas that others may not figure out on their own. You are holding a roadmap that has great value to someone. What has been stopping you from sharing your knowledge? Perhaps you have been afraid to put yourself out there because of a fear of rejection? Let me get straight to the point. Get over it right now! Ponder the following quote for a moment and then move on with the decision to write rather than not to write, because not to write is not "to be". You deny yourself and your audience. You have had an incredible journey to get to where you are and have amassed experience and knowledge. Now combine that with your unique voice and be heard. You are already an expert. Accept it. ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Self-censorship can be very damaging to a story. When our chief goal is not to offend someone, we are not likely to write a book that will deeply affect someone. ~ Katherine Paterson

With all the things I know, one could write a book ... Although, one
might also say that, considering all that I don't know, one could create
a library. ~ Sacha Guitry

I don't want to write a book; I don't want to go on T.V., because I stink at it. The only thing I have always been comfortable with is being in magazines. ~ Patti Hansen

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors. ~ Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

When you write a book there are no more pretenses or facades to hide behind. It is very liberating to proclaim "this is who I am. ~ Jonathan Heatt

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. ~ Laurie Colwin

Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival. ~ Kate Atkinson

I'm going to be super successful one day, and I'm going to write a book. It's going to be a kickass autobiography. And this is how it always happens in the book. This is just that part of the book where the character is going through hard times. This is that sucky part of the story. Just get through a few more pages, and it's going to have an amazing ending. ~ Ronda Rousey

I'm a situational writer. You give me a situation, like a writer gets in a car crash, breaks his leg, is kidnapped by his number-one fan, and is kept in a cabin and forced to write a book
everything else springs from there. You really don't have to work once you've had the idea. All you have to do is kind of take dictation from something inside. (from Parade Magazine interview, 5/26/13) ~ Stephen King

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it. ~ Louis L'Amour

When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely. ~ Daniel Kehlmann

When people climb a mountain, they don't stay there. They come back down and tell everyone they climbed a mountain. Writing a book is like that. If you write a book, you should tell everyone. ~ Bob Howard

I urge you with all sincerity to get to work, write a book, write two - three - four books, just as a matter of course. Don't worry about 'wasting' an idea or 'spoiling' a plot by going too fast. If you are capable of turning out a masterpiece, you'll get other and even better ideas in the future. Right now your job is to write, and to write books so that by so doing you'll gain the experience to write still better books later on. ~ Robert Bloch

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. ~ Robertson Davies

Your good friends can write a book on you; but Your best friends can create an embarrassing full fledged 3 hours movie on you, with silliest jingles and animation made ever. ~ Vikrmn

I would love to write a book that opens people's eyes to the more interesting side. ~ John Gimlette

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas ... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation. ~ Miguel Syjuco

You're a writer," she said. "You get to live someone else's life every time you write a book. But I'm stuck with mine. It's lonely. ~ Ava Sinclair

In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.

Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It's definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.

For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There's no page of prose in existence that its author can't improve after it's been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I'm amazed I ever struggled with them.

Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them? ~ Charles Finch

I've learned a lot of tricks from working with a lot of great producers over the years, and I think I should write a book about it! ~ Ace Frehley

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year. ~ David Baldacci

The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, "Do try to be like other people. Don't frown." And he tried and tried, but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions.

Reader, if young, take warning by his sad life and death. For though it may be an honour to be different from other people, if Carlyle's dictum about the 30 million be still true, yet other people do not like it.

So, if you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do. In particular, if you are going to write a book, remember the wooden-headed. So be rigorous; that will cover a multitude of sins. And do not frown. ~ Oliver Heaviside

One retired pastor, who felt that he was being called to write a book about homosexuality, interviewed me. He said he wanted his book to be pastorally compassionate toward gay people while exhorting the church to remain firm in holding to a traditional, biblical sexual ethic. He said, "You have to be careful to not love people too much. Loving people changes you." Indeed, loving people does change you. Loving people who are different than you changes you. But it seems to me that such change is consistent with the call of Christ. Allowing your heart to enter the beauty and brokenness of another's life (which really isn't so different from your own), to hear hopes and dreams and disappointments, fears and hurts and joys does change you. One ought not be afraid of that. ~ Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

Someone should write a book where the main character slowly falls in love with the reader. ~ Unknown

I was given the opportunity to write the kind of book that I wanted to write, rather than one that catalogues where I sang and what I sang and what I wore. I wanted to write a book about an American family, the family that has produced me. The longer I live, the more I realise the incredible support and love we were given as children. ~ Jessye Norman

By about the sixth romance I knew I wasn't in exactly the right place. I liked writing action. And I wanted to write a book with a little more edge than I was allowed in romance. ~ Janet Evanovich

Fatherhood is the best thing I ever did. It changes your perspective. You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is really the most extraordinary thing I have taken on. ~ Brad Pitt

I don't think you should write a book until you tell the absolute truth. You can't do that until you're 85, and I don't want to live that long. I've always prided myself on knowing when to get off, and I hope it works out that way. ~ Lucille Ball

My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I'd spend time with family. Tell me one year, I'd write a book. Give me ten years, I'd get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help: What was I supposed to do with that day? At ~ Paul Kalanithi

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject. ~ Mary Roach

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that. ~ Linda Sue Park

Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay. ~ Elmore Leonard

Somewhere among the commotion I grew rather depressed. The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen-is it here or isn't it? No sign of it. Perhaps it's asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV-Good Morning America, David what's-his-name, a guy I can't stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk-and here she is, my faithful depression: "Did you think you could leave without me?" I had often warned my students not to identify with their work. I told them, "if you want to achieve something, if you want to write a book, paint a picture, be sure that the center of your existence if somewhere else and that it's solidly grounded; only then will you be able to keep your cool and laugh at the attacks that are bound to come." I myself had followed this advice in the past, but now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense. I often wished I had never written that fucking book. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel. ~ George R R Martin

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life. ~ Moshe Kasher

I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff. ~ Jane Smiley

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started. ~ Gore Vidal

It didn't seem to matter that Reagan made his heartfelt endorsements of traditional family values despite being divorced and so alienated from his own children that one of them would write a book about what a rotten father he had been; by the same token, the president's failure to have made regular or even occasional visits to church hardly dimmed his appeal for the resurgent religious right ~ Douglas Brinkley

Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form. ~ David J. C. MacKay

I knew that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to read one, too. ~ Michael Showalter

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject. ~ Richard Dawkins

Black is the most slimming of all Colors. It is the most flattering. You can wear black at any Time. You can wear it at any age. You can wear it for almost any occasion. I could write a book about black. ~ Christian Dior

You want to write a book? Make a song? Direct a movie? Decorate pottery? Learn a dance? Explore a new land? You want to draw a penis on your wall? Do it. Who cares? It's your birthright as a human being, so do it with a cheerful heart. (I mean, take it seriously, sure - but don't take it seriously.) Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in. ~ Tracy Kidder

Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about. ~ Jack Kent Cooke

Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child ~ Nachman Of Breslov

If I write a book I do it mostly for myself for the child in me and for the adult in me. The criterion for my children's books is: If I were a child would I like it That's very egotistical but it's the same thing with my books for adults. I wouldn't do a book if I didn't want to partake and share. With a book I can do both: I give and I share. ~ Tomi Ungerer

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book. ~ Michael Lewis

So you walk along Bunker Hill, and you shake your fist at the sky, and I know what you're thinking, Bandini. The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot ire in your skull, that you are not to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, fled from your Colorado town because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.
Yes, it's true: but I have seen houses in Bel-Air with cool lawns and green swimming pools. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed. I have seen golf clubs on Sixth Street in the Spalding window that make me hungry just to grip them. I have grieved for a necktie like a holy man for indulgences. I have admired hats in Robinson's the way critics gasp at Michelangelo. ~ John Fante

Book writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone who decides to write a book must expect to invest a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. Books do not write themselves and they do not sell themselves. Authors write and promote their books. ~ Dan Poynter

But I did - I did want to write a book, and I knew what the first line would be: "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but he'll never call me anyway. No one will ever call me again." And this was based on a true thing. See, the doctor that pumped my stomach sent me flowers. With a note that read: "I can tell that you are a very warm and sensitive person." All that from the contents of my stomach! I was tempted to marry him so I could tell people how we met. ~ Carrie Fisher

President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. Isn't that amazing? Yes, and get this, not only that, President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003. ~ Conan O'Brien

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. ~ Mike Tyson

I want to write a book called, "Bonfires and Bras," which follows around a young, braless feminist who struggles to adopt in air conditioned rooms, as her hardened nipples cause her excess embarrassment. ~ Jarod Kintz

I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman. ~ Betty Friedan

To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

When I really want to learn about something, I write a book on it. Then the real research begins, as I begin to hear people's stories, and huge amounts of information begins to comes straight to my doorstep. Then I can write an even better book the next time! ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum. ~ Douglas Kennedy

You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book. ~ Thulani Davis

I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn't take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys. ~ George Burns

I decided to write a book primarily because people talked me into it. ~ Terry Bradshaw

Suppose the word mountain meant metaphor, and dog, and Bible, and the United States. Clearly, if a word meant everything, it would mean nothing. If, now, the law of contradiction is an arbitrary convention, and if our linguistic theorists choose some other convention, I challenge them to write a book in conformity with their principles. As a matter of fact it will not be hard for them to do so. Nothing more is necessary than to write the word metaphor sixty thousand times: Metaphor metaphor metaphor metaphor ... . This means the dog ran up the mountain, for the word metaphor means dog, ran, and mountain. Unfortunately, the sentence "metaphor metaphor metaphor" also means, Next Christmas is Thanksgiving, for the word metaphor has these meanings as well. ~ Gordon H. Clark

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me. ~ Walter Raleigh

To write a book, we must write with our whole life, not just during the moments we are sitting at our desk. When writing a book or an article, we know that our words will affect many other people. We do not have the right just to express our own suffering if it brings suffering to others. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I actually didn't mind too much that Gabriel had spent the past four nights in my room. He was relatively quiet, didn't go through my things, and liked to listen to my weird book ideas late at night. When I told him that I wanted to write a book about zombies taking over our town, he suggested that I make myself the hero and said nonchalantly, "You could even have to kill me after I get bitten. Wouldn't that be an awesome twist?" I didn't tell him then but I had no intention of ever letting him die in any book. ~ John Corey Whaley

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum. ~ Anthony Trollope

Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching." - From an ancient Assyrian tablet. ~ Sidney Homer

If you want to write a book that's very successful and famous, then it's hard. If you just want to get published, all you have to do is convince an editor that your idea will make them money. ~ Kate Cary

People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it ... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait. ~ Michelle M. Pillow

But there was one revelation that came out od TXT4sex. And it was this: any idiot can write a book.
So that is what I did ~ Morgan Parker

I get very invested in characters, it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work. ~ Gail Simone

Negative experiences repeat as long as they remain useful to you. ~ Tawny Lara

Unfortunately in the matter of Speech Defects, when so much depends on the temperament and individuality, a case can always be produced that can prove you are wrong. That is why I won't write a book [Lionel Logue concluded] ~ Mark Logue

I wanted to write a book that talked about the emotions of children, which is the rainbow. We all have moods. We talk about being blue when we're sad, and being yellow when we're cowards, and when we're mad, we're red. ~ Dolly Parton

Enthusiasm is big. When I write a book, it's a three-year commitment. Toward the end, I'm writing seven days a week, and it's exhausting but thrilling. The only hope is to have some real enthusiasm for the book ... Above all, you need some strong emotional or personal connection to your material. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

A brick could be used to help you write the book you've always wanted to write. That is, if you wanted to write a book on masonry with a target market of two - your parents. ~ Jarod Kintz

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world. ~ C.S. Lewis

He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood. ~ Clive Barker

In most homes, from what I know of them, even though the woman's place in that particular home might be in the home, still, she is queen of her house. So I like exploring the many different incarnations of women in that country, actually. You find quite a range of these women in this book - each one of them embodies a completely different personality type. And how can you write a book that's only full of men, anyway? I mean, half the population of this world is women. ~ Anita Rau Badami

It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well. ~ Mary Roach

That an author's work is the mirror of his mind is a position that has led to very false conclusions. If Satan himself were to write a book it would be in praise of virtue, because the good would purchase it for use, and the bad for ostentation. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

I want to write a book so long that it will take the average person their whole life to read. It will be exactly the same length as the Bible. ~ Jarod Kintz

Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them ... engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann's observation that, 'a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it. ~ Paulo Coelho

I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that it is realistic, in psychological terms. I deal with matters that might normally be encountered in works of realism, such as adolescence, sexuality, and so on; and they are the main subject matter of the story – the fantasy (which, of course, is there: no-one but a fool would think I meant there is no fantasy in the books at all) is there to support and embody them, not for its own sake.

Daemons, for example, might otherwise be only a meaningless decoration, adding nothing to the story: but I use them to embody and picture some truths about human personality which I couldn't picture so easily without them. I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvelous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? ~ Philip Pullman

I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch. ~ Diablo Cody

I am glad there are things in the Bible I do not understand. If I could take that book up and read it as I would any other book, I might think I could write a book like that. ~ Dwight L. Moody

It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book. ~ Thomas Keller

Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them. ~ Chloe Thurlow

You know what? I'm going to write a book. ~ Khali Raymond

True artists, whatever smiling faces they may show you, are obsessive, driven people
whether driven by some mania or driven by some high, noble vision need not presently concern us. Anyone who has worked both as artist and as professor can tell you, that he works differently in his two styles. No one is more careful, more scrupulously honest, devoted to his personal vision of the ideal, than a good professor trying to write a book about the Gilgamesh. He may write far into the night, he may avoid parties, he may feel pangs of guilt about having spent too little time with his family. Nevertheless, his work is no more like an artist's work than the work of a first-class accountant is like that of an athlete contending for a championship. ~ John Gardner

You should write a book," Matrick suggested.
Kit snorted. "Who wants to read the self-pitying lamentations of an old revenant?"
"There's your title right there," said Ganelon. ~ Nicholas Eames