c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.
— C. JoyBell C.
The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am.
— Shannon Hale
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
— Joe Haldeman
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.Trust your demon.
— Roger Zelazny
There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
— Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Books are for nothing but to inspire
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
— Leo Rosten
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
— Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
— May Sarton
Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives
— Alfred de Musset
(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.
— Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
— Edna Ferber
Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
— Jeanette Winterson
I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that it is realistic, in psychological terms. I deal with matters that might normally be encountered in works of realism, such as adolescence, sexuality, and so on; and they are the main subject matter of the story – the fantasy (which, of course, is there: no-one but a fool would think I meant there is no fantasy in the books at all) is there to support and embody them, not for its own sake. Dæmons, for example, might otherwise be only a meaningless decoration, adding nothing to the story: but I use them to embody and picture some truths about human personality which I couldn't picture so easily without them. I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvelous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen?
— Philip Pullman
He’s an indulgent sort of man……With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships.
— Coco J. Ginger
Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.
— Robin McKinley
The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid
—  a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.
— Chuck Palahniuk
When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.
— Preston Sturges
Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
— Sholem Asch
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
— David McCullough
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women
— Gustave Flaubert
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
— Gustave Flaubert
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
— Toni Morrison
Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.
— Gregory McDonald
I just want my stories to be mine.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:"Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out."And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one. 
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.
— Giacomo Casanova
Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.
— David Farland
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.
— Raymond Chandler
If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.
— Billie Holiday
We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.
— Lauren Hammond
Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.
— Amy Joy
Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.
— Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
I write because I cannot NOT write.
— Charlotte Brontë
Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)
— Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry and Other Stories
In Hollywood, no one knows anything.
— William Goldman
Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.
— Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.
— James J. Kilpatrick
It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.
— Khaled Hosseini
If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.
— Alice Walker
And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!
— David Almond, My Name Is Mina
Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.
— Israel Shenker
Writer speaks a stench.
— Franz Kafka
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Writing is prayer.
— Franz Kafka
Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!
— Brian Jacques
I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
— Irwin Shaw
How can you write if you can't cry?
— Ring Lardner
I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
— Tiffany Madison
The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.
— Paolo Bacigalupi
a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.
— Roland Smith, Peak
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. 
— Isabel Allende, My Invented Country : A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.
— Jayce O'Neal
I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.
— Jay-Z, Decoded
Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.
— Alberto Moravia
And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.
— Andre Dubus III, Townie
I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
— Maya Angelou
A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...
— C.J. Heck
Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.
— Jeffrey Robinson
Too many irons, not enough fire.
— S. Kelley Harrell
I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
— Lorrie Moore
Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
— Will Self
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
— Socrates
Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.
— Mary Gaitskill
Never put off writing until you are better at it.
— Gary Henderson
When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.
— Hillary Frank, I Can't Tell You
You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?
— L.M. Montgomery
Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.
— Walter Moers, Die Stadt der Träumenden Bücher
To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.
— Charlotte Brontë
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
— Geoff Dyer
If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise 
— John Cleese
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
— Cormac McCarthy
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
— Ann Brashares
And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--" "It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonderland
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!", May 10, 1886)
— Anton Chekhov
I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.
— Toni Morrison
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
— Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
— Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.
— Elmore Leonard
Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.
— Laurie Halse Anderson
A writing may be lost
—  a lie may be written
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.
— Woody Allen
A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.
— Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.
— H. Jackson Brown Jr.
All novels are sequels
—  influence is bliss.
If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
— A.M. Homes
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
— Vita Sackville-West
No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
— Stephen King, Different Seasons
I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
— Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters
When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.
— Dennis Cooper
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
— Flannery O'Connor
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
— Don Marquis
Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.
— Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.
— Aaron Sorkin
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
— Karen Blixen
Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.
— Oscar Wilde
You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
— Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.
— Stephen King, Misery
Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.
— Margaret Mahy
‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
— Stephen King
Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you
— Ginnetta Correli
Why write stories? To join the conversation.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.
— Jake Black
Writing is a mysterious activity.
— Susan Sontag
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."]
— Ray Bradbury
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]
— Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf
...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The Politeness Of Princes And Other School Stories
Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.
— Michael McDowell
10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.
— Brian Clark
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
— Anthony Burgess
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
— Terry Pratchett
When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
— Hilaire Belloc
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
— David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business
Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
— Joseph Conrad
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
— Robert Penn Warren
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
— Raymond Chandler
Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.
— Stephanie Connolly
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
— Pierre Abélard, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
I could not think without writing.
— Jean Piaget
Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
— Jules Renard
When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.
— M.G. Marsh, Letters
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.
— George Orwell
For me, I think it was a little easier to write thinking that nobody was listening.
— Dan Kennedy
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
— Margaret Atwood
It's a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you've mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You've done your research, gathering the facts; historical, social, climatic culinary, that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with color, contrast and telling detail.Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing.In spite the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been pestering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: IT WON'T WORK.An element is missing, that spark that brings to life in a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right.Your story is emotionally dead, that's the crux of it.The discovery is something soul-destroying, I tell you. It leaves you with an aching hunger.
— Yann Martel
All the time she writing the world had continued.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.
— George Pelecanos
Do you write novels?" I said."Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.
— Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
— Henry David Thoreau
In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.
— Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories
People who understand everything get no stories.
— Bertolt Brecht
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
— William Faulkner
Reading maketh a full man
—  conference a ready man
If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
— Natalie Goldberg
It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. 
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward
— J.R. Ward, The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider's Guide
Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.
— Harlan Ellison
Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.
— Anne Lamott
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.
— Henry Miller
Write like it matters, and it will.
— Libba Bray
Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.
— Lilith Saintcrow
In a way, I was safe writing
— Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father
It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.
— Ariel Gore
Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.
— Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry
Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
— Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
Get black on white.
— Guy de Maupassant
President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.
— Aaron Sorkin
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
— Russell Banks
The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out
— Michael Ondaatje
My books are mine, and yet they are alien to me--as a child belongs to a parent and yet has a life of its own. I can guide and hope and nudge my characters this and that way, but in the end, they become what they become. I don't always like what they become myself, but like a parent, there are times when I just don't know what to do about it. Other times when I'm so proud of them I could bust.
— Laura Kinsale
Art glows with faith even in its weakest parts. At every moment, writing is an act of self-confidence – the sheerest, most determined, most stubborn self-belief. You CAN have faith and doubt at the same time; the most insecure writer on the planet has faith that shines just as bright as her doubt, and she deserves props for that. It might be hidden deep, she might not feel it and you might not see it, but it’s in there, or she wouldn’t be able to write.
— Kristin Cashore
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.
— Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington
Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.
— Robert   Harris, The Ghost
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
— Kerry Greenwood
If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.
— Donald Harington
A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.
— Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches
a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
— Tobias Wolff, Old School
Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.
— Glen Keane
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
— Ann Patchett
To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
— William Gibson
Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.
— Paul Pearsall
I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
— Pat Conroy
After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
— Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream:MistakesDelaysStarting overFailureThe building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature but far more interesting. You might start a creative dream, take the "next step", and find yourself completely bored, dissatisfied, or just not inspired. 
— S.A.R.K., Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills! 
— Robert Fanney
It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.
— Nancy Horan, Loving Frank