c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Work. Don't Think. Relax.
— Ray Bradbury
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
— Robert Frost
But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.
— Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul
— Albert Camus
As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.
— Stephen King, Misery
We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.
— Ngaio Marsh, Ngaio Marsh: A Life
My lips are fierce with passion. My heart spins fiery beats. A rhythm lives within my fingers and dances in my feet.
— Coco J. Ginger
The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words.
— Elizabeth J. Kolodziej
I am a drinker with writing problems.
— Brendan Behan
A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.
— Michael Piller
I realized Michael was right. I mean, I am always writing in this journal. And I do compose a lot of poetry, and write a lot of notes and emails and stuff. I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as a talent. It's just something I do all the time, like breathing.
— Meg Cabot, Princess in Waiting
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
— Charles Dickens
If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.
— Dani Harper
Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.
— Harlan Ellison
Goals are dreams with a deadline.
— Napoleon Hill
A migraine is the cockblock of writing.
— Don Roff
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
— Ernest Hemingway
I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .
— Elvira Woodruff
I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.
— Richard P. Denney
First and foremost, I am me. I'm real. I don't write to impress. I write to express.
— RaeBeth McGee-Buda, The Miracle
Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.
— Edgar Allan Poe
There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.
— S.A. Reid, Something Different
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit.", The Guardian, 20 February 2010]
— Will Self
You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
— Will Self
I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
All stories are love stories.
— Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street
I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.
— Stephen J. Cannell
الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة
— Isabel Allende, La suma de los días
Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
If you don't think too good, don't think too much.
— Ted Williams
We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone.
— Iain Reid, One Bird's Choice
Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.
— Patricia C. Wrede
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.
— Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction
My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.
— Walter Kirn
I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette. 
— Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
It's not how great the ideas are. It's about how you write them, to make them great.
— Primadonna Angela
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
— Jorge Luis Borges, Borges on Writing
Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.
— Marty Rubin
Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
— Ren Garcia
In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.
— Jefferson Smith
I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.
— Katherine Paterson
When you write, you are telling a story...to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself...over and over again.
— Kai Strand
Fiction is a great combination between experience and imagination.
— Desi Puspitasari
Somebody is observing my writings, I know that.That's one reason why I keep reading and writing.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
What's so great about writing?" "You can make anything true
— Adi Alsaid, Somewhere Over the Sun
Eating was still a sore point with Smriti.She failed to understand,when interesting options like mango juice or chocolates were available,why was she forced by her stupid mother to eat boring regular meals?After much contemplation,Nikhil came up with a suggestion'Don't give her food till she herself asks for it'.His idea'starve-to know-the-worth-of -food'made sense to Abhilasha,though it took her a great deal of resolve before she could actually try it out. So on a sunday,the'lady with an iron will'took over from'the soft and kind hearted mother'.she did not give her anything to eat and waited for the golden moment,expecting a hungry Smriti to beg for food.But the much awaited moment never came.Smriti was not at all bothered about her meal and kept playing happily. The day turned into evening and still there was no trace of hunger in her."Aren't you feeling hungry?' now a worried mother had no option but to eat the humble pie and ask the daughter."No Maa. My friend Pinky had brought wafers and chocolates. Those were so yummy that I ate them all......"And that was the end of her'starve-to -know-the-worth-of-food-mission.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.
— Mark Leidner, The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
— Carl Sandburg
If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.
— Tiffany Madison
That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.
— Kelly Barnhill
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.
— David Morrell
A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.
— C.K. Webb
Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.
— Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.
— Philippe Claudel, Brodeck
It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
— Niyi Osundare
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'.
— Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
— Joyce Carol Oates
In the country of the story the writer is king.
— Shirley Jackson, Come Along With Me
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?
— Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind
I go silent so I can write. When my tongue is wagging my fingers are silent.
— Sonia Rumzi, Simple Conversation
Writing is like baking cupcakes, you're trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes it's flour and eggs and stuff, and with books it's ideas and words. The end result is the same though, you want people to eat them up.
— Emma Shortt
From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.
— Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.
— Banana Yoshimoto, N.P
What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.
— Natalie Goldberg
If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.
— Linda W. Yezak
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...
— A.S. Byatt
To breathe is to live, but to write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.
— M. Clifford, The Book
I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it's only when you start pinning words to paper that it becomes less than perfect. You have to make your choices, set your limits. Start whittling away at the cosmos, and don't stop until you've narrowed it down to a single, ordinary speck of dirt. And in the end, what you've made is not nearly as glorious as what you've thrown away.
— Carolyn  Parkhurst, The Nobodies Album
I go with the flow but I write against it.
— Tamara Jasmine Burrell
I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.
— Elmore Leonard
When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
— Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
— Cory Doctorow
I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.
— Jeanne Voelker
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
— Paul Fussell
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of. But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.
— Orson Scott Card
I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.
— Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters
Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.
— Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing
The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.
— Washington Irving
One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.
— James Salter, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
— Stephen King
I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.
— Lori R. Lopez
I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)
— Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
— Ring Lardner
After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.
— Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet
It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960)
— Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
— Dorothy L. Sayers
What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.
— Paul Di Filippo, Fuzzy Dice
That isn't writing at all, it's typing.
— Truman Capote
That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.
— Heywood Broun, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord
i write, because not breathing is not an option.
— Monice Mitchell Simms
Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.
— Ambrose Bierce
There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified.They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along.
— James Ellroy, Destination: Morgue!
An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
— Mignon McLaughlin
Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!
— Leif Enger, So Brave, Young, and Handsome
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
— William H. Gass
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
— George Orwell
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
— M.F.K. Fisher
We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.
— Javier Marías
First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
— T.C. Boyle
The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.
— Machado de Assis
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.
— Toni Cade Bambara
It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.
— Stephen Crane, The Portable Stephen Crane
You cannot write unless you write much.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
— Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.
— Lorna Crozier, Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained
We do not like the truth because it is simple, we do not want the truth because it is hard, and we do not trust the truth because it is free. Perhaps because many are idealists and publishing is so frustrating, writers are particularly vulnerable to believing in those who offer hope in exchange for cash. Writers know life is tough and we all want to think of an easier way. Maybe for a rare few, there is. If you count on that, you are a chump and somebody is going to take your money and break your heart.
— Pat Walsh, 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might
Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it but it takes brains to build a house. 
— Charles F. Lummis
If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.
— Charles Nodier
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Arithmetic is the death of story.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
— Toni Morrison
Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece...Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things...Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend's voice during a late-night phone call, alure like a lover's whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words.
— Jiro Adachi
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
— Gustave Flaubert
Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
I can't help thinking of Jackson Pollock, who poured, splattered and lashed the canvass with strings of paint. His process was about snaring not only a vision, but the moment the vision occurred to him. The paint becomes a net cast around something too fast to be caught. The bare spaces between the net's strands are as significant as the strands themselves because they hint at what can't be painted, can't be described.
— Jocelyn Lieu
Remember that wasted minute at the start of the day? Hard luck but you'll never find it again.
— Cleveland W. Gibson
I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
— Ruth Rendell
We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence and start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
— Laurence Sterne
The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
— Larry Levis
Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.
— Kit Reed
Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.
— Paula Vogel
What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret. 
— Gail Sher
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon
— Garrison Keillor
Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past. 
— J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.
— Elinor Fuchs
If for instance the sentiment possessing for the moment the empire of our mind is sorrow, will not the genius sharpen the sorrow and the sorrow purify the genius? Together, will they not be like a cut diamond for which language is only the wax on which they stamp their imprint? I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek out details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that the details come naturally without search by the poet, that inspiration takes the place of reflection and as for unity, I think there is no unity so perfect as that which results from a heart filled with a single idea...The nature of genius is related to that of instinct; it's operation is both simple and marvelous.
— Charlotte Brontë
No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.
— Thomas Lux
The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
— Nancy Etchemendy
Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.
— Adam Johnson
That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.
— Preston Sturges
I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.
— Michael Chabon, Werewolves In Their Youth
In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm
— Gustave Flaubert, November
I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?
— Janet Fitch
I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
— Anthony Trollope, Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.
— Anthony Trollope, Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
It ain't a crapshoot unless you write crap.
— Jonathan O'Brien
Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours there is no life without them. 
— Herman Wouk
I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.
— Nadège Richards, Asylum 54.0
A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires.
— Steve Aylett, The Inflatable Volunteer
I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.
— Robert Ludlum
Sometimes, God doesn’t send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.
— Shannon L. Alder
Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants." magazine, March 1903)]
— Jack London
Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those tiny, little thoughts trapped inside an author’s head that―in an excited explosion of words―suddenly become a captivating fairytale!
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.
— John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill
God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
And so I just kept writing to myself.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, "Hi. Thanks for writing me!
— Alvi Syahrin
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.
— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.
— Lisa Scottoline, Look Again
[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.
— William Lawrence Bragg
Words are a puzzle put them together the right way and you get something beautiful. 
— Amy Joy
The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
The hardest things to write are often the best things to read. And the most deserving to be written.
— David Alejandro Fearnhead
Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
♔ Writing is my passion. I never want to let it go. It may be short, Fan-Fiction or purely my own work. But it is my kingdom, I am the princess. For all the noble readers in the kingdom, I bring them joy with tales. My knights that protect me, are my fellow writers. The dragon would be the inspiration for my writing. The fortune teller would be my best friend, giving me hope. The castle would be Wattpad, it keeps everything protected. ♔
— BritHoran
Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.
— scavola
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
— David Foster Wallace
It is strange to hear my wordsRead back to me.I don't think I wrote themTo have them ever leave the page.I think I only writeWhat happens across my brainWhen my feet are too weary To dance anymore.
— Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition
J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]
— George Sand, Correspondance
...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Importance of Being Seven
At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
I kill my loneliness by reading and (then) writing, damn.
— Desi Puspitasari
The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings
Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai
— Mar Mai, The Dragon Tutor
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
— Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.
— Gregg Olsen, Envy