"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense
the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition
just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea
that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."--Mark Twain
"Word-carpentry
is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly."--Anatole France
"Put the argument
into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry
home with them, and the cause is half won."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One
of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the
rest just comes out very easily."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if
the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."--Flannery O'Connor
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."--Albert Camus
