Plath, writing on her typewriter, Yorkshire, 1956

But at least I wrote today--my first new poem since leaving Provincetown. And I have a brand new typewriter! Well, actually, it's quite old (appears to be from the forties or so); my Polish grandfather handed it down to me as a gift, since he never uses it anymore. In celebration, some of my favorite quotes from Crazyhorse's Top 100 Quotes About Writing (my list is poetry-oriented, obviously):

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith

"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo

"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen

“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury

"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor

“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton