c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
— Gertrude Stein, Paris France
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009]
— Cormac McCarthy
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
— Oscar Wilde, Reviews
And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
— Neil Gaiman
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
— L.L. Barkat
Persistence can look a lot like stupid.
— Kristen Lamb, Are You There Blog? It's Me, Writer
It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.
— Kristen Lamb
Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.
— Linda W. Yezak
Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
— Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
Everything I've written up to this point is crap. Now I'm going to write the real one
— Ted Dekker
Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.
— William Strunk Jr.
Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.
— Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.
— Louisa May Alcott
Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.
— John Patrick Lowrie, Dancing With Eternity
Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought about her. But after a while, she started to take on a personality of her own, and I was suddenly more interested in her story than I was in mine.
— Caitlin Elyse
Silently I dance a dance of chaos to the rhythm of a dying sun
— Wayne  Howell
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
— Alain de Botton
Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
— Ngaio Marsh, Death on the Air and Other Stories
In older myths, the dark road leads downward into the Underworld, where Persephone is carried off by Hades, much against her will, while Ishtar descends of her own accord to beat at the gates of Hell. This road of darkness lies to the West, according to Native American myth, and each of us must travel it at some point in our lives. The western road is one of trials, ordeals, disasters and abrupt life changes — yet a road to be honored, nevertheless, as the road on which wisdom is gained. James Hillman, whose theory of 'archetypal psychology' draws extensively on Greco–Roman myth, echoes this belief when he argues that darkness is vital at certain periods of life, questioning our modern tendency to equate mental health with happiness. It is in the Underworld, he reminds us, that seeds germinate and prepare for spring. Myths of descent and rebirth connect the soul's cycles to those of nature.
— Terri Windling
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.
— Barbara Kingsolver
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick.
— Christopher Hitchens
I'd been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I'd stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn't think of writing anything else.
— Allison van Diepen, The Vampire Stalker
You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life, in understanding and in creating. There is no measuring in time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.
— Theodora Goss
If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
— Bernard Malamud
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.
— Garth Nix
grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.
— Theodora Goss
I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.
— Jeanette Winterson
And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
— Connie Willis
Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.
— Darlene Craviotto, An Agoraphobic's Guide to Hollywood: How Michael Jackson Got Me Out of the House
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.
— Haruki Murakami
We writers are a crazy group. I can't think of any other profession where the actual work is deep within, uncomfortable, and wanting out.
— C.J. Heck
... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.
— Mike Bryan, The Afterword: A Novel
I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.
— Lettie Prell
Creative exhaustion is first cousin to writer’s block. First off, I try to accept that when it hits, I am not wasting time, but preparing myself to return to work. I blog more. I do something different, like answering this question. If I can’t force myself to finish a story, then perhaps it was not worth finishing. If I have to push rather than let it flow, it won’t be as good as if I take more time, mess around in the garden and try to shove the guilt deep into the compost pile. I am still a writer so long as I am thinking!
— Sue Isle
Writing is like life: it goes on.
— Marty Rubin
There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.
— Tiffany Madison
Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.
— Pascal Quignard
To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.
— Gerard de Marigny, The Watchman of Ephraim
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
— John Steinbeck
Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.
— Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe
It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.
— Linda Nelson
murder your darlings
— Arthur Quiller-Couch
But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.
— Lauren Willig
Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.
— Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly
As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Novel writing is like heroin addiction it takes everything you've got. 
— James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling
I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.
— J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
— Geoff Dyer
Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.
— Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia
That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.
— Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe
Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.
— Mary Pipher
but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death.
— Elliot Mabeuse, A Good Student
A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.
— A. Lee Martinez
I’ve always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…
— Phil Dusenberry
There is a point at which honesty becomes mischief. That's when your writing becomes irresistible.
— Daphne Athas
Write until your fingers break. It may be the cure for everything.
— Kelly O'Connor McNees
When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.
— William Styron
He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.
— Voltaire, Candide
There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.
— E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions Brüder: Gesammelte Erzählungen Und Märchen In Vier Bänden
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
— Hélène Cixous
From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...
— Haruki Murakami
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.
— Mirra Ginsburg, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.
— Paulo Coelho
A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature
I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell. 
— William Styron
Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.
— Christina Westover
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
I live entire lifetimes in my head. Sometimes simultaneously.
— Cypher Lx
...'being published’ is not the same as being a real writer.
— Scarlett Thomas
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
— Haruki Murakami
Writing is the voices inside our heads, our minds, the creativity that exists for us to, from nothing, create alternate worlds, manipulate a personality or to introduce a new kind of love, a new kind of hate or pain or happiness or wonder or... anything we want. Through words, we can do, we can be anything we want.
— Allie Burke
If I’m writing, at least I don’t feel as paralyzed.
— Laura Goode, Sister Mischief
The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
— Ray Bradbury
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?
— Rabih Alameddine, I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters
I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.
— Haruki Murakami
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.
— C.K. Webb
In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!  
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days.
— Holly Robinson
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
— W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.
— Don Roff
There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
— Isaac D'Israeli
Remember yourself. Deep inside, you have an observer, a constant neutral witness to your posture, gesture, facial expression, breathing, taste, impressions of light and sound. Don't leap to interpret. Just be there and observe.
— Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing
I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing.
— Jeff  Bowen
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.
— Sylvia Plath
My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.
— Don Murray
Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.
— Athol Fugard
Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.
— Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
Stop talking about it and just WRITE!
— C.K. Webb
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
— Richard Ford
God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. (“Mad House”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
St. Bernard said, ‘Every word one writes smites the Devil.
— Lillian Stewart Carl, Lucifer's Crown
remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.
— Stephen King
People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!
— C.K. Webb
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.
— Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
— Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
— Susan Sontag
If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.
— James T. Farrell
Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.
— Phil Cousineau
Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke...
— Zadie Smith
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
— Virginia Woolf
Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them...engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann's observation that, 'a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others
— Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus
If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.
— Hugh Prather
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.
— Natalie Goldberg
Keep on reading, thinking, doing and writing! Words keep introducing their friends to you.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.
— Simon Cheshire
I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.
— Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Don't make the editor's decision for her by not submitting.
— Victoria Janssen
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
— José Saramago
In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions — as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.
— Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.
— Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction
As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies.
— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
— George Ade
La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.
— Heiner Müller
All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. 
— Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010)
— Gary Shteyngart
Just start at the beginning, you say? And what beginning might that be? I've come to the conclusion all starts are false ones. Tap the fragile shell of any beginning and you'll find another nested inside.
— Christina Sunley
Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery....I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?
— Arthur Conan Doyle
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
— Cyril Connolly
Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'You enjoy this duty?'He nodded.I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.
— Roger Zelazny, The Hand of Oberon
Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it, don't become a writer
— Leon Uris
Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane
— Hope Edelman
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.
— Alice Munro
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
— Carl Van Doren
Whoever has received knowledgeand eloquence in speech from Godshould not be silent or secretivebut demonstrate it willingly.When a great good is widely heard of,then, and only then, does it bloom,and when that good is praised by man,it has spread its blossoms.
— Marie de France
Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.
— Jorge Luis Borges
This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.
— Stephen Potter
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
— William Saroyan, My Heart's in the Highlands
Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
— Flannery O'Connor
I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.
— Toni Morrison
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
— Catherine Drinker Bowen
When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.
— Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories
...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.
— Ted Conover
A book gets rejected because it's not ready to be published.
— Gina B. Nahai
Many people can and have written books, but many have nothing to say.
— Amy Rogers
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
— Charles Caleb Colton
This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.
— Jonathan Lethem
The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face.“What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness. “Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.
— James Van Pelt
The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.
— J.V. Cunningham
All plots are cliche.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?
— Carolyn See
Less is more.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide To Writing Nonfiction
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
— Wallace Stegner
I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
— Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot