#authors

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors. ↗

— Voltaire

#writing #nature

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #empowerment #feminism #gender #history

Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#castles #creativity #richelle #richelle-goodrich #worlds

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#richelle #richelle-goodrich #writers #writing #richelle-goodrich

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#appears #authors #best #burn #drink

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! ↗

— Henry James

#authorship #fiction #writing #art

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#authors #because #books #booksellers #destination

There were speeches made in Congress in the very last session before the outbreak of the Rebellion, so ferocious as to show that their authors were under the influence of a real frenzy. ↗

— Edward Everett

#before #congress #ferocious #frenzy #influence

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#authors #beginning #correcting #edition #end

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination. ↗

— Tycho Brahe

#authors #been #clear #devised #exist