James Joyce on writing

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

(Of Shakespeare) A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading