Thomas Wolfe from Of Time and the River:
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being — the reward he seeks — the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
Joseph Conrad in his famous preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897):
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel it is, before all, to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything.â€
Attributed to Albert Camus:
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
Lord Byron from Don Juan:
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
‘Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper – even a rag like this – ,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.