By Anne Frank
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
We write our names in the sand: and then the waves roll in and wash them away.
To a poet every curve of her was a well place word.
Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
One day I’ll paint the perfect sunset – if I can only find the words.
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
Common people are merely intent on spending time – whoever has some talent, on making use of it.
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new content.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall ‘spend’ their time; a man of talent tries to ‘use’ it.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
