c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
— Toni Morrison
A good story cannot be devised
—  it has to be distilled.
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
— Alice Munro
Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it.
— Krista Ritchie, Addicted to You
You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing...
— Josip Novakovich, Fiction Writer's Workshop
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.
— Alan Dean Foster
Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.
— Paulo Coelho
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
— Octavia E. Butler
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
— Vladimir Nabokov
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
— Isadora  Duncan
A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.
— Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
— James     Baldwin
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
— Pearl S. Buck
DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.
— Frank Miller, Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
— George Orwell, 1984
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
— Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker
Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
— Warren Ellis
Buku yang kau tulis adalah semacam jejak yang terus menyala di dunia, dan bisa menjadi cahaya akhiratmu.
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
The thing I write will be the thing I write.
— Steve Shilstone
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. 
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar.
— Henry Miller
Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
— Paul Auster
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
— Gustave Flaubert
take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning
— Charles Bukowski
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one
—  it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.
— Alice Hoffman
A writer is a world trapped in a person.
— Victor Hugo
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
— Jonathan Franzen
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Every writer I know has trouble writing. 
— Joseph Heller
Writers will happen in the best of families.
— Rita Mae Brown
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
— Iain M. Banks
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins
You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.
— Will Rogers
Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.
— Jennifer Weiner
Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.
— Don Roff
Books choose their authors
—  the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.
— Louis Sachar
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'", March 25, 2007.)
— David Halberstam, Everything They Had: Sports Writing
Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?" "The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you?" "Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham." "What age would that be, Toby?""Late twenties?" "Atta boy.
— Aaron Sorkin
She doesn't quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.
— Frank Miller, Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
— Annie Dillard
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.
— Elvis Costello
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
— Ernest Hemingway
Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.
— Patrick Rothfuss
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
— Herman Melville
People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God.
— Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.
— Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.
— Tahereh Mafi
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
— E.B. White
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.
— Anne Lamott
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Writers write while dreamers procastinate. 
— Besa Kosova
I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
— Aaron Sorkin
In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).
— John Scalzi
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.
— Maya Angelou
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.
— Gustave Flaubert
The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.
— Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault
No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
— Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!
you must not come lightly to the blank page.
— Stephen King
I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.
— Beth Revis
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.
— Quentin R. Bufogle
Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!
— Dave Barry
It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.
— Madeleine L'Engle
A novel rough draft is like bread dough
—  you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
— May Sarton
Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.
— Laura Kasischke
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.
— John Wick
I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
— William Carlos Williams
The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.
— Natalie Goldberg
Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
— Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories
I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
— P.G. Wodehouse
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes
—  unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
— Charles Péguy, Basic Verities, Prose, and Poetry
A Gift for YouI send you...The gift of a letter from your wise self. This is the part of you that sees you with benevolent, loving eyes. You find this letter in a thick envelope with your name on it, and the word YES written boldly above your name.My Dear,I am writing this to remind you of your 'essence beauty.' This is the part of you that has nothing to do with age, occupation, weight, history, or pain. This is the soft, untouched, indelible you. You can love yourself in this moment, no matter what you have, or haven't done or been. See past any masks, devices, or inventions that obscure your essence.Remember your true purpose, WHICH is only Love.If you cannot see or feel love, lie down now and cry; it will cleanse your vision and free your heart.I love you; I am you.
— S.A.R.K., Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.
— Philip Roth
We are all pencils in the hand of God.
— Mother Teresa
In a weak moment, I have written a book.
— Margaret Mitchell
Jane's stories are too sensible. Then Diana puts too much murders into hers. 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." -Anne Shirley
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed.
— Patrick H.T. Doyle
Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.
— Erica Jong
Membaca dan menulis membuatmu menjadi.
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
If you wish to be a writer, write.
— Epictetus
Almost anyone can be an author
—  the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.
— Neil Gaiman
Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. 
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. 
— Mark Twain
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
— Doris Lessing
From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse On Wodehouse
I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.
— Rick Riordan
We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Why Dream?Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams.
— S.A.R.K., Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
— Stephen King
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
— Flannery O'Connor
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
— Stephen King
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.
— David Foster Wallace
On the whole, stories don't write themselves.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Science fiction is not prescriptive
—  it is descriptive.
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
— P.G. Wodehouse
My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect
You are either born a writer or you are not.
— Cormac McCarthy
All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
— Denis Diderot
A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It's a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to creative pursuits.
— Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. 
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
— Mark Twain
You’re a mess, I confess, I despise you in the best kind of way.
— Coco J. Ginger
I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why wouldn't it be? All important things are hard.
— Toni Morrison
Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.
— Philip Pullman
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
— W. Somerset Maugham
No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....
— Alexander Trocchi
Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
— Paul Rudnick
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language
—  it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
— P.G. Wodehouse
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him...A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
— Roald Dahl
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
Writing is like sausage making in my view
—  you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.
Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.
— Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed
All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.
— Jimi Hendrix
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, Truth And Beauty
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
— Jane Yolen
Being a writer is a good, good thing.
— Shannon Hale
I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.
— Tennessee Williams
I write out of revenge.
— William Goldman
Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
— Mel Brooks
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.
— Charlotte Brontë
I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
— Ernest Hemingway
Seperti apakah Anda? Menurut saya, paling tidak Anda adalah apa yang Anda tulis.
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent. 
— Aaron Sorkin
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
— Cecil Day-Lewis
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write
— George Sand, Indiana
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
— William Faulkner
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
— Gustave Flaubert
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
— Samuel Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II
Realism can break a writer's heart.
— Salman Rushdie, Shame
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
— China Miéville
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
— Thomas Wolfe
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
— Robert Benchley
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
— Lois McMaster Bujold
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
— Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
— Adrienne Rich
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
فكم من الأشياء قد تحدث لنا بسبب ما نقرأ.ذلك أن ثمة قراءات تفعل بنا فعل الكتابة، وتوصلنا إلى حيث لا نتوقع !
— أحلام مستغانمي
To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!
— Lillian Cauldwell
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
— André Breton
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
— Mark Twain
First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
— Terry Pratchett
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
— Terry Pratchett
You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
— Jodi Picoult
If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.
— Bernard Knox, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
— Jean Cocteau
Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.
— Horacio Quiroga
There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.
— Alex de Campi
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
— Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
— Jessica Mitford
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bagombo Snuff Box
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
— Vladimir Nabokov
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
— Lauren Groff
The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.
— Fran Lebowitz
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
— Karl R. Popper
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
— Frederik Pohl
People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
— Italo Calvino
What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
— Ernest Hemingway
There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.
— Diane Duane
Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.
— Dave Barry
All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.
— Steven Millhauser
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
— Franz Kafka
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
— John Gardner
Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon. 
— Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
— Truman Capote
Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?
— T.C. Boyle
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
— Winston S. Churchill
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
— May Sarton
Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.
— James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling
Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.
— The Script
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:ETC.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.
— Lyndsay Faye, Jane Steele
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
— Alan Moore
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.
— Tim O'Brien
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
— Neil Gaiman
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
— Maya Angelou
In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me.", 26 June 1956]
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children
Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
— Ernest Hemingway
The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.
— Don Roff
I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.
— J.K. Rowling
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
— W.H. Auden