“Tomorrow, is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.”
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters
“Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books”
"A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut. Jr." by Robert Scholes in The Vonnegut Statement (1973) edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer October 1966), later published in Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut (1988), p. 123
Various interviews
Context: Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books … why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with … humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.
About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.”
“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
“I'm writing this book because we're all going to die”
In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...
Visions of Cody (1960)
Almost Transparent Blue (1976)
