c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.
— Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them
— William H. Gass
Storytellers are individuals who enjoy creating a holiday for the mind.
— Linda Daly
The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
— John Mason Brown
How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own?
— Shaila M. Abdullah
Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.
— Janet Burroway
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
— William H. Gass
You have made some notes, read some writing books, and done some research. Mostly what you've done is talk about writing a book. An idea for a book is not a book; it is a waste of time. There is no singular thing that makes someone a writer, but there is one thing that makes someone a joke--talking about writing a book without doing any work.
— Pat Walsh, 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.
— Jeremy Reed
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
— Roberto Bolaño
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
— Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, tome 2
The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Stories do not change the world. I’ve learned that. But perhaps in some secret, subtle way.... I mean it’s not the world I want to change.
— Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories
I intend all my characters must escape from impossible situations; if they are not in trouble, then as a writer, I am.
— Cleveland W. Gibson
So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all.
— Guillermo del Toro
It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
— Jonathan Lethem
But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
— Charles Nodier
We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.
— Stephen Kuusisto
A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual...
— Jacob Neusner
Life's adventures make great reading!
— Denise Robbins
Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.
— William Gibson
I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.
— Annie Dillard
Genuineness is often sacrificed in order to showcase the author's control over the form and subject matter, the end result technically sound but emotionally cold.
— Jennifer S. Davis
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
— Colette, Earthly Paradise
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
— Richard Rodríguez
I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.
— Georges Simenon
To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
— Steve Almond
Awful first drafts are fine—Agree with this.If you don’t finish something, you’ll never get in the game. Just quell the voice in your head that says “Are you kidding? No one is going to want to read this drivel” and keep on going. You’re going to revise and revise and then revise again anyway.
— Jamie Freveletti
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
— J.P. Donleavy
Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.
— Julia Bell, The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing…For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.
— John Banville
Vigorous writing is concise.
— William Strunk Jr.
Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one’s first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality.
— Shatrujeet Nath
Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor — closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.
— Leigh Brackett, The Best of Planet Stories 1
Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the work­shop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Per­haps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard. 
— Pliny the Younger, The Letters of the Younger Pliny
The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office’s waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.
— Glen Hirshberg
May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.
— Grant Morrison
Believe in your characters with all your heart, & they will believe in you. Only then will they trust you enough to reveal themselves. -RCSJR
— Robert Clifton Storey Jr.
The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.
— P.G. Wodehouse
The voice of a Black woman should always be HERSELF ...No edits - no erasure - no pressure - no expectations - no additions - no intruders
— Malebo Sephodi
I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
— Shannon Hale
You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!
— Margarita Gakis
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.
— Neil Gaiman
Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
— Tom Robbins
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own. 
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically  mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it. 
— Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Don't be indifferent about any random idea that occurs to you, because each and every idea is for a particular purpose. it may not be beneficial to you, but can be what others are craving for
— Michael Bassey Johnson
I have often believed the pen to be a needle, and ink to be a thread. Each story is an intricately woven tapestry and with each word I invariably sew a piece of myself into the page.
— Shaun Hick, The Army of Five Men
When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.
— P.S. Bartlett
If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.
— Neil Gaiman
To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
— Dejan Stojanovic
One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.
— Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are
— Niall Williams, History of the Rain
As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.
— Orson Scott Card
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look. 
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
All trademarks, company names, registered names, products, characters, mottos, logos, jingles and catchphrases used or cited in this work are the property of their respective owners and have only been mentioned and or used as cultural references to enhance the narrative and in no way were used to disparage or harm the owners and their companies. It is the author's sincerest wish the owners of the cited trademarks, company names, etc. appreciate the success they have achieved in making their products household names and appreciate the free plug.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.
— Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... 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
I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. 	If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say:	'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!
— Anton Chekhov, The Exclamation Mark
drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.
— Samuel Beckett
Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
— Charles Bukowski
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
— Tom Stoppard
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature. 
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Writing is the best anti-depressant.
— Fierce Dolan
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then. 
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.
— Teresa Mummert
Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
— Brian Raif
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
— H.P. Lovecraft
Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?
— J.D. Salinger
Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.
— Veronica Roth
The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
— John Lanchester
Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.
— E.B. White
Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.
— Katrina Monroe
It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.
— Charles Bukowski
It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
It's in my blood, as magic is in yours." His mouth is still smiling, but his tone is somber. "I couldn't stop writing even if I wanted to.
— Elora Bishop, Braided: A Lesbian Rapunzel
Write when you least feel like it,Because that's when you write best.
— Nema Al-Araby
Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.
— Naomi Kinsman
Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.
— Eric T. Benoit
I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!
— Ashly Lorenzana
I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.
— David Freeman Hawke
Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.
— Jessica Lave
Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
— Piers Anthony
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
— P.D. James, Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights
It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.
— Neil Gaiman
They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.
— Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
— Umberto Eco
In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life.", email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)
— T.C. Boyle
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Content is King. Promotion is Queen
— Bob Mayer
He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.
— Coco J. Ginger
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.
— Theodora Goss
Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.
— Jeanette Winterson
We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
— L.L. Barkat
And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).
— Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
— G.K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")
— W.B. Yeats
Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.
— Holly Lisle
He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back")
— Garry Douglas Kilworth
Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.
— Ngaio Marsh, Death on the Air and Other Stories
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.
— Theodora Goss
From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.
— Jack London
You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.
— Ngaio Marsh, Death on the Air and Other Stories
Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.
— Grace Bridges
A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.
— Victor J. Banis
Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.
— Toni Cade Bambara
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice‎
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
— Neil Gaiman
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.
— N.K. Jemisin
If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.
— Nikki Giovanni
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
— Grace Paley
Writing is the great invention of the world.
— Abraham Lincoln, Discoveries and Inventions: A Lecture by Abraham Lincoln Delivered in 1860
A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run
— Channing Pollock
I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.
— R.J. Dennis
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
— Lydia Davis
When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)
— John Varley, The John Varley Reader
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
— Joan Didion
What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.
— Lynette Mather
Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.
— Aberjhani
Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.
— Don Roff
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
— Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children
Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.
— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it
— William Meikle
The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.
— Mark Twain
One Lifetime is not enough.
— Maurice Northmore
Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
— Brenda Ueland
Never let negativity derail your journey as a writer. Use the energy for your own betterment.
— Guadalupe Neri
I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
— Irwin Shaw
‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.
— James Joyce
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Follow the rules until you make them.
— Luke Green
STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book?RICHIE:I did decide to write about what i experienced in climbing to the top. And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top.You know what was there?STRAUSS: No, I don't.RICHIE: Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there.
— Neil Strauss
Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.
— Margaret Jean Langstaff, Marlin, Darlin': Garnet Sullivan Live from Florida #1
There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.
— Shannon L. Alder
They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.
— Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi
Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.
— Arnošt Lustig
Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.
— John Bunyan, Christiana's Journey Or The Pilgrim's Progress, The Second Part
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11
— Walter Mosley
We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)
— Thomas Newkirk, The Art of Slow Reading: Six Time-Honored Practices for Engagement
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
— Richard Harding Davis
An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.
— Shannon L. Alder
If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.
— Truman Capote
The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....
— Anna Comnena, The Alexiad
A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.
— Patty Smith
Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.
— Quentin R. Bufogle
I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!
— Christina Westover
I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a "something from nothing" quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107).
— Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays
Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
— Beck
Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.
— Jonas Eriksson
As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.
— Christina Westover
Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke’s gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.
— Douglas Bond
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it anything more than that is advertising. 
— Hanif Kureishi, The Word and the Bomb
If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.
— Sharon Delarose
To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.
— Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy