Literary Genius Quotes

“I sit on the precipice of my creative sensibilities staring over and out into a wide expanse of sparkling madness and sometimes envy those who simply fall into it and let everything else go. I suppose that’s what writing poetry is for.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[...] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.”
― Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

“I was in full digression! far from the subject!...my colonel was losing track...rapidly, of my story! my story!...my own story!...the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven!...yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts!...I'd made him repeat them a hundred times!...enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me!...everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed!...they could just go fuck off!...drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles!...it was mine or theirs!...crawl or breastroke!...you understand!...the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not!...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.”
― Hilary Mantel

“I just want to write - in peace, on peace, for peace.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Her Insan Ailem: Everyone is Family, Everywhere is Home