Well, Write

A great book, a great evil.
— Callimachus (c. 305 - c. 240 B.C.), Fragments, in An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything, Frank Muir, p. 101.

The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
— Voltaire (1694-1778), Letter to Mlle. Quinault, in Ibid., p. 102.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
— William Faulkner (b. 1897), in Ibid., p. 104.

An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
— John Ruskin (1819-1900), in Ibid., p. 238.

The seeds of this nineteenth-century concept of the Great Artist as Semi-Lunatic were probably sown during the period of the Italian Renaissance when Leonardo da Vinci claimed that there was a bit more to art than slapping colour on to wet plaster as instructed. He argued that painting was cosa mentale, 'a spiritual thing'; and the Bible clearly stated — Hosea ix:7 — 'the spiritual man is mad'.
— Ibid., p. 238.

Art is something you marry, it's not something you rape.
— Edgar Degas (1834-1900), in Ibid., p. 238.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
— Augustin Saint-Gardens (1848-1907), in Ibid., p. 238.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
— Samuel Johnson (1709-1984), from Boswell's Life, 5 Aug. 1763, in Ibid., p. 329.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
— Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), in Ibid., p. 248.