p.

“If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro: Short Story