Epigrams for Writers

[Here are a few epigrams that I've always found inspiring--the way a sculptor finds a block of granite inspiring.]


Art consists in going the full length.
--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.
--Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea



People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, �Circles�


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We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
--Henry James, �The Middle Years�


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The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own �I� ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author�s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being



I am on the side of angels and dirt.
--Stanley Spencer


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What matters finally is not the world�s judgment of oneself but one�s own judgment of the world.
--Gore Vidal, "Norman Mailer's Self-Advertisements"




How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel?� Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul.
--George Steiner, Paris Review interview


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We created the art before we had the society.
--Vladimir Tatlin


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Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
--Alasdair Gray