“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”— Truman Capote Related Quotes “Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”— Carlos Ruiz Zafón “…in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”— Joseph Brodsky “I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn’t that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”— Ann Patchett