c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition.
— Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
— Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons
I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.
— Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.
— Amy Neftzger, The War of Words
I cry often. I cry and cleanse my face with my tears and swim to the center of it all. A center that I have written about a thousand times, forever etched into the porcelain.
— A.P. Sweet, dead, but dreaming
A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
— Howard Mittelmark, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide
The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!-
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Writing is the new reading
— Emlyn Hall, Diary of a Teenage Murderer
The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.
— Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun
Always choose love over fear.
— A.D. Posey
Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.
— Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle
No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.
— Kyoko Yoshida
We are the thoughts we choose to keep.
— A.D. Posey
And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer's attitude toward "obsolete" words is as true a measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not happen to be a competent reader.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Writer: It's not an occupation it's a compulsion. 
— Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.
— M. Kirin
To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
— Jean Genet
How many things can I do without?
— Socrates, Momentos
Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.
— Kimberly Black, A Fiction Writer's Character Workbook
I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.
— Jonathan Harnisch, Porcelain Utopia
Being an artist doesn't take much. Just everything you got. Which means of course that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it completely, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.
— Hubert Selby Jr.
The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
— P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.
— Cheryl Alleway
What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.
— Stephen King, Nightmares and Dreamscapes
The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.
— Vera Nazarian
I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.
— Alistair Cross
I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force
— John Thomas Idlet, Epopoeia And the Decay of Satire
Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)
— Christopher Lehman
My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.
— J.R. Tompkins
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?", December 31, 1989)]
— Ken Kesey
He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
— Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
— Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.
— C. Kennedy
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
— John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote
The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.", 6 March 2012]
— Susanna Clarke
And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference between, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while he,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze. is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.
— Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.
— James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
— Edna O'Brien, Country Girl
A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.
— Joe Queenan
The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.
— Alexei Maxim Russell
There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.
— Terri Windling
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.
— Linda Olsson
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
— George Orwell
Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.
— Peter James West
[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure.Gutman:From yourself?Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!
— Tennessee Williams
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
— John Steinbeck
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.  Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.  Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.  Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues.  A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.
— Oriana Fallaci
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
— Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
— Gustave Flaubert
They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find.
— Keith Ridgway, Hawthorn & Child
I don’t want to re-write the same old book with the same tired techniques. I’d rather bring something new to the table that’s true to me and that people will have a genuine reaction to. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
— Veronika Carnaby
It's quite simple. I just don't feel right without a pen in my hand denting a hole through my notepad.
— Veronika Carnaby
Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Don't Fall in Love With Your Words: Fall in Love With Your Craft
A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.
— Sterling Lord, Lord of Publishing: A Memoir
There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.
— Valerie Fitzgerald
Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.
— Stephen Fry, The Library Book
There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
— E.B. White, One Man's Meat
... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.
— E.A. Bucchianeri
Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
— Katrina Monroe
Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong.
— Kevis Hendrickson
I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians.When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer.Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.
— Terry Tempest Williams
Writing is not just a process of creation. It is also a process of self-discovery
— Cristina Istrati
It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes
I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.
— Theodora Goss
Writing is a lot like making soup. My subconscious cooks the idea, but I have to sit down at the computer to pour it out.
— Robin Wells
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
— Craig Raine
...ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.
— Shandy L. Kurth
It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.
— Brent Weeks
The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes.
— Raymond Chandler
Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.
— Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.
— Andrea A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.
— Margaret Atwood
...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.
— Andrea A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer
I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...
— Stephen King
Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.
— Christopher Stocking
One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.
— Keith Gessen
The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.
— Robert  Stone
As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.
— Frederick Weisel, Teller
Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.
— Joyce Carol Oates
M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...
— Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic
Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
The surest path to success is to learn to have a healthy relationship with failure. If we aren't failing, then we aren't doing anything interesting.
— Kristen Lamb
My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Ashes
I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
— George Orwell
Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.
— Chris Dee
I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.
— Renee  Miller, Writer's Companion
The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.
— Chris Dee
Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.
— Jo Linsdell
When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
— Ann Patchett
Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.
— Mary O'Hara, Een zoele zomer in Wyoming
Writing is not about the voices in your head, but the voices that make the great leap to the page.
— J.H. Glaze
It's the witching hour once more-When the Muse comes out to play.He calls me through that magic door-Where galaxies of worlds await!
— Belle Whittington
I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...
— George Gordon Byron
Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.
— Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
— Anne Rice
For the length of time it takes to write a book, you need to believe that you’re the only writer in existence; the only one who matters. You need to shut yourself away and allow the creativity to build up, not leak out through worry and comparisons and doubt.
— Martin Cosgrove
I often think publishing a book is like doing a poo. Once it's ready for the world, you have to relinquish that control and let nature take its course. A few will be impressed by your creation, others will be disgusted. Plus, no one will enjoy your success and achievement in producing it as much as you did.
— H.O. Charles
Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere?
— Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
— Jack London
You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.
— Richard Peck
I write because, if I don't, my characters will murder me in my sleep.
— Astrid 'Artistikem' Cruz
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
— Stephen King
Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.
— Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
— Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction
Fact is just fiction with different storytellers
— Abby Slovin, Letters In Cardboard Boxes
You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.
— Jenny Hubbard, Paper Covers Rock
Menulis itu peduli. Menulis itu mencinta.
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
— E.M. Forster
How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency 
— Foz Meadows
The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.
— Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created A New Mythology
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
— Ernest Hemingway
The hard part is putting one word after another.
— Jo Linsdell
A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
— Thomas Hardy
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
— Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction
It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.
— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.
— Jyoti Arora
Characters who simply have goals opposed by others do not create the effects of a story.
— Bill  Johnson
Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.
— Roberta Gellis
A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
— Robert Benchley
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.
— Adam Gopnik
Writer's Block is just an excuse by people who don't write for not writing.
— Giando Sigurani
Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
— Howard Mittelmark, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.
— Vladimir Nabokov
If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that’s different; it makes it worthwhile then.
— Alan Marshall
People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don’t be shown up by a baboon
— James Scott Bell
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
— Patricia Hampl
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day a novel should not be interrupted. 
— François Mauriac
The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"
— Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an actionis through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire letrun, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It canonly be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.
— Ray Bradbury
Writing starts with living.
— L.L. Barkat, Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
— Salman Rushdie
It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.
— Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.
— T.C. Boyle
Aside from wanting to write cracking good books that turn children into lifelong readers, I really want to create stories that enable kids to LOOK at the world around them. To see it for what it is, with wide open, wondering eyes. Our mass media is so horribly skewed. It presents this idea of 'normalcy' which excludes and marginalises so many for an idea of commercial viability which is really nothing but blinkered prejudice. People who are black and Asian and Middle Eastern and Hispanic, people who are gay or transgendered or genderqueer, people who have disabilities, disfigurements or illnesses - all have this vision of a world which does not include them shoved down their throats almost 24-7, and they're told 'No one wants to see stories about people like you. Films and TV shows about people like you won't make money. Stories about straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied people are universal and everyone likes them. You are small and useless and unattractive and you don't matter.'My worry is that this warped version of 'normal' eventually forms those very same blinkers on children's eyes, depriving them of their ability to see anyone who isn't the same as them, preventing them from developing the ability to empathise with and appreciate and take joy in the lives and experiences of people who are different from them. If Shadows on the Moon - or anything I write - causes a young person to look at their own life, or the life of another, and think, 'Maybe being different is cool' I will die a happy writer.-Guest blog - what diversity means to me
— Zoë Marriott
Our job as writers is to be as curious as a child, to see things for the first time, and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story to allow the larger story to emerge. We are seeking to understand the nature of things, the underlying forces at work.
— Alan Watt, The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within