“A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”

Variant: First you will smile, and then you will cry -- don't say you haven't been warned.
Source: A Walk to Remember

Attributed

Wild World
Song lyrics, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Giovanni's Room

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them. The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died. My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves. He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words. How many times he has said to me, "In others I have always looked for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one but her."

Source: Adverbs

Hays translation
II, 11
Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book II