"But your five hundred lines in three days will be dead and forgotten, while my three lines will live forever," replied Euripides.
Sir Fowell Buxton thought he could do as well as others, if he devoted twice as much time and labor as they did.

Ordinary means and extraordinary application have done most of the great things in the world.
Defoe offered the manuscript of Robinson Crusoe to many booksellers and all but one refused it.

Addison's first play, Rosamond, was hissed off the stage, but the editor of the Spectator and Tattler was made of stern stuff and was determined that the world should listen to him, and it did.
David Livingstone said: "Those who have never carried a book through the press can form no idea of the amount of toil it involves.

The process has increased my respect for authors a thousand-fold.

I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book." "For the statistics of the negro population of South America alone," says Robert Dale Owen, "I examined more than a hundred and fifty volumes." Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his book as many as fifty times.
It is said of one of Longfellow's poems that it was written in four weeks, but that he spent six months in correcting and cutting it down.
Bulwer declared that he had rewritten some of his briefer productions as many as eight or nine times before their publication.