I am a shadow

These are some quotes I found interesting. Slow Saturday…

‘You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.’

F Scott Fitzgerald

‘Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.’

Julie Burchill

‘Coleridge was a drug addict.  Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was stabbed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire; then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer -and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House

‘Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages - all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and underpaid person.’

Doris Lessing’s writers’ manifesto, courtesy of Rosemary Friedman in Writers’ Forum

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air.  The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.’

David Beaty