The black and white certainties about writing....

"The black and white certainties about writing - is that there are no black and white certainties about writing - except the print on paper." Margaret Buffie

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They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say, don't listen to writers talk about writers or themselves. Lillian Hellman

Beware of advice - even this. Carl Sandburg

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. Philip Roth

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reasons the opinions of others. Virginia Woolf

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

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough. Flannery O'connor

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. 

G. K. Chesterton

Easy reading is damn hard writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne

And one of my all time favs: 

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit. PG Wodehouse