Gustave Flaubert....

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

J.M. Synge....

"When I was sitting writing 'The Shadow of the Glen' I got more aid than any learning would have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen." (Preface to The Playboy of the Western World)

Winston Churchill.....

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public."

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s first letter to Emily Dickinson asked her what reading she had done. When Dickinson replied that she had only heard bad things about Whitman, critic Higginson replied:

"It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote 'Leaves of Grass,' only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly plough in his first crop."