“For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential.”

Linking good prose with patience and precision of thought · Essay, Literary Composition

• Discipline
• Patience
• Writing

“Struggling with the aridities of Ithaca—an astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen.”

An exuberant description of the intellectual machinery behind Ithaca. · Letter to Claud W. Sykes, 1921

• Knowledge
• Structure
• Writing

“I wish to write a story with enough of interest in its characters and incidents to attract a certain amount of popular attention.”

Explaining his intention to combine popular storytelling with deeper intellectual purposes · Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, September 13, 1860

• Purpose
• Readers
• Writing

“The great novel deals with human action as well as with mental portraiture and analysis.”

Arguing that major fiction requires characters to act rather than merely to be described · Essay, Plot and Character, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Character
• Literature
• Writing

“Let us leave it then unwritten for the present, and think how much more precious is an infinite series of undefined expectations than any paltry performance or transient fruition.”

A memorable defence of possibility and anticipation over forced production · Letter to Edward Everett Hale, December 7, 1869

• Imagination
• Potential
• Writing

“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”

Writing as an involuntary compulsion rather than a choice · Conversation / letter (as commonly attributed)

• Compulsion
• Creativity
• Writing

“Poetry is the attempt to express the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable.”

Defining the core artistic ambition of the poetic form · Essay on modern poetry

• Art
• Poetry
• Writing

“I believe editors do claim that right until their contributors get too important to be interfered with.”

A wry observation about the unequal power between writers and editors · Letter, August 19, 1882

• Editors
• Power
• Writing

“A man cannot keep a daily record of his comings and goings and the little items that make up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn.”

Suggesting that ordinary details recorded honestly reveal character more clearly than formal autobiography · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

• Character
• Identity
• Writing

“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out.”

Defending the language of The Sun Also Rises with typically mischievous understatement · Letter, 21 August 1926

• Humour
• Language
• Writing

“I envy anyone who writes in French not so much because I envy the resources of that language but on account of the public to which one can appeal.”

Joyce contrasts linguistic possibilities with the expectations of different reading publics. · Letter to Fanny Guillermet, 1918

• Language
• Readers
• Writing

“I am working like a galleyslave, an ass, a brute. I cannot even sleep.”

A vivid description of the punishing effort Joyce devoted to his writing. · Letter to Valery Larbaud, 1920

• Endurance
• Work
• Writing

“Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.”

Humorously describing the conflict between creative work and domestic responsibilities · Letter to Cassandra Austen, 8 September 1816

• Humour
• Work
• Writing

“One may be ashamed to consume half one's days in bringing sense and rhyme together.”

Wryly placing literary labour beside life's other demands · Preface to The Works of Alexander Pope, 1717

• Humour
• Time
• Writing

“Why, well, I was going jingling along with some new verses in my heart, and I knew I'd lose the tempo if I became militant.”

Suggests that the creative impulse could matter more to him in the moment than confrontation or conflict. · Recollection of conversation, as reported by Slason Thompson

• Creativity
• Humour
• Writing

“In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on.”

Her celebrated description of Richardson's radical representation of ordinary consciousness and lived experience. · Essay, The Novels of Dorothy Richardson

• Experience
• Life
• Writing

“I will never write another biography of a living man. It is too difficult and thankless a task.”

Reflecting on the challenges of writing an authorised biography under the subject's close supervision · Letter to John Farrar, 14 September 1937

• Biography
• Difficulty
• Writing

“I fluctuate between seasons of lurid wealth and extended periods of acute financial depression.”

On the irregular income of magazine verse and stories · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Money
• Profession
• Writing

“Unity is that principle whereby every part of a composition must have some bearing on the central theme.”

Defining structural unity as the relevance of every element to the central purpose · Essay, Literary Composition

• Discipline
• Structure
• Writing

“Sending a poem is just the very way to have the whole matter considered by the sober pot-boilers over the whole kingdom as a fanciful and visionary thing.”

She preferred a plain prose plan to verse when campaigning for chimney-sweeps · Letter to James Montgomery, 5 February 1824

• Charity
• Pragmatism
• Writing

“I require this information in detail in order to determine the wording of a paragraph.”

A revealing example of Joyce’s extraordinary concern with factual precision in his fiction. · Letter to his aunt Josephine Murray, 2 November 1921

• Attention
• Precision
• Writing

“It is no vice to amend oneself, but it is extreme malice to persist in one's fault.”

Original: Car ce n'est pas vice de s'amender, mais c'est extrême malice de persister en son peché. — Revision treated as a moral duty of the writer · Preface to the second edition of La Franciade (French)

• Correction
• Humility
• Writing

“I want always to be the amateur, the poet who writes because he needs to and loves it, and not because it is his profession.”

A memorable statement of his resistance to professionalising poetic creativity. · Conversation with Robert Penn Warren, as recalled by Warren

• Freedom
• Love
• Writing

“The essential point of fictional narration is plot, which may be defined as a sequence of incidents designed to awaken the reader’s interest and curiosity as to the result.”

Defining plot through its ability to create curiosity about what comes next · Essay, Literary Composition

• Reading
• Storytelling
• Writing