c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Initially, I feel expansive when I try something new, and then contract as soon as I encounter difficulty or the unknown. I am learning to experiment with my tolerance of difficulty and the not knowing, in order to go further with my creative dreams.Whenever I experience contraction, I explore it by asking, "Where did I stop and why?" Building a creative dream life is not just about achieving, succeeding, or "meeting goals." It is also about floundering, stumbling, tripping and failing. 
— S.A.R.K.
I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
Identifying Your DreamSome people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.
— 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
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The pen is mightier than the sword unless it's a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.
— Roger Eschbacher
I think that I had better go, Holmes.""Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Well I want something to do, to create, to achieve, to whatever.... Something I can’t get enough of. You know something that I can't wait to get up in the morning to do something I can't get enough of, something that brings me joy and makes my heart sing. It could be anything, could be more than one thing but something that grabs me. Even a job, if it grabs me so that I could hardly wait to get there. Something that makes me feel good, allows me to be me, gives me freedom to grow and expand, something that grasps my heart, my joy, my excitement and leads me down the path to more joyful things, exciting challenges and challenging things. Barely stopping to take a breath I continued. Need a new journey a new destination, I want to grow to be or become, tread a new path, see what I haven't seen be what I haven't been ask what I haven't asked dare to what I haven't dared to . . . I don't even think it is so much a physical thing or mental it's just sort of un-learning some of what I learned It’s being happy, while I am happy but I want something to do that creates even more. (..)Doing it for the joy of doing it not for any other reason; also I want it from and un-edited creativity free flowing something… I have some things that seem very interesting and somehow just don’t feel right almost like I’m taking the wrong path and yet there are other things that I could be doing like writing but it seems that it does not feel good to sit and write but yet some part of me seems to love it and something in me hates it sort of like it could be the thing for me to do and yet it might not be.
— Klaus Joehle, A Weekend with 'a' Drunken Leprechaun: "Finding Your Joy"
I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.
— Janet Fitch
I have been writing now for over a week. I find it cleansing, refreshing; it is good for me.” (p.531)
— Storm Constantine
Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.
— Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days
Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.
— Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Writing:It starts at the keyboard,and it ends at the far corners of the universe. --Paako
— Vincent Lowry, Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries
The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.
— Lloyd Alexander
Our books are the deepest glimpses into our souls, the most raw and real anybody will ever find us.
— Melodie Ramone
There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
— Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.
— Raymond Carver
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me
—  it is my life.
I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
— Stephen King, Just After Sunset
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.", May/June 2009)]
— Stephen King
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. 
— James Norman Hall
That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
— Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.
— Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand
Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
— Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
— Jennifer Weiner
Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work - and realizing what opportunity is and what isn’t." — Lucille Ball
— Lucille Ball
Wrote my way out of the hood...thought my way out of poverty! Don't tell me that knowledge isn't power. Education changes everything.
— Brandi L. Bates
What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?
— Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.
— Willard R. Espy, Say it My Way: Ho
She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.
— Millard Kaufman, Bowl of Cherries
Before there were books, we read each other.
— Lisa Cron, Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.
— Elmore Leonard, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing
But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
— Raymond Chandler
You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
— Michael Chabon
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
— Shirley Jackson
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
— Gaston Bachelard
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
— Roman Payne
A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
— Thornton Wilder
Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.
— Jean Little
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
— Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls
I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.
— Tennessee Williams, Notebooks
I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.
— Lauren Willig
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
— Jonathan Franzen
Writing is the emotional morphine.
— Mariam Maarouf
I wisely started with a map.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.
— Ryan Adams, Infinity Blues
There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it. 
— Morley Callaghan
She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
— Cynthia Voigt, When She Hollers
The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.
— Rita Webb
I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I love Sherlock Holmes. I've got all his books, leather-bound. What I thought was great about Sherlock Holmes was that not only was he a supersleuth, he was also a hard worker. Not only did he go out and solve the crimes, he came home and wrote it all down. Fantastic. That's why I admire him.
— Steve Coogan, Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word
Anyone who writes is too precious to lose. 
— Carlos J. Cortes
In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.
— James Scott Bell, Plot & Structure: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Plot That Grips Readers from Start to Finish
Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages
— Isabel Allende, My Invented Country : A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
The job of the writer isn't to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.
— J.M. Porup
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. 
— Norman Mailer
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
— Gore Vidal
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
— Gertrude Stein
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.)
— William S. Burroughs
I don't write fantasy
—  I write historical novels about an imaginary place.
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
— Franz Kafka
Inside CriticsThe critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our "inside critics" have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest spots. You might be told by the critics that you're too fat, too old, too young, not intelligent enough, a quitter, not logical, prone to try too many things...It's all balderdash!Some elements of these may be true, and it's completely up to you how they affect you. Inside critics are really just trying to protect you. You can:Learn to dialogue with them.Give them new jobs.Turn them into allies.You can also dismantle/exterminate them.
— S.A.R.K., Creative Companion: How to Free Your Creative Spirit
I don't know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn't get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children."Look around yourself, Mathilda," she said. "At the magnificence of nature. It should inspire joy and awe. Reverence. Respect. Beautiful thoughts and fine words."I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest days.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
— Gustave Flaubert
Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
— Fran Lebowitz
True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.
— Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction
He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.
— Stephen King, Misery
It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.
— Neil Gaiman
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
— Edmund White, My Lives
If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
— Lori Lansens, The Girls
Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.
— John Yau
If writing didn't require thinking then we'd all be doing it.
— Jeremiah Laabs
When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
— William Faulkner
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
— Tim O'Brien
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
— Gore Vidal
So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.
— Janet Frame
Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a strong voice will often have trouble at the start of his or her career because strong,distinctive voices sometimes make editors nervous. But in the end, only the strong survive.
— Jayne Ann Krentz
The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it. 
— Bill Barich
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
— Charles Caleb Colton
He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.
— Grant Morrison
And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.
— Rick Riordan
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
— Anne Lamott
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
— William Faulkner
Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. 
— William Zinsser
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
— Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
— Paul Valéry
I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.
— Tom Wolfe
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
— Charles Baudelaire
I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly
— Ulysses S. Grant
What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.
— Noël Coward
If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.
— Aaron Sorkin
You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.
— Carolyn Kizer
You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.
— Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. 
— Alice Walker
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
— Edmond Jabès
Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
— Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
— Richard Flanagan
Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected.Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.
— Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.
— Esther M. Friesner
And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog.
— Neil Gaiman
It wouldn't happen... There hasn't been one publication by a monkey
— Karl Pilkington, The Ricky Gervais Show - First, Second and Third Seasons
A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.
— J. Michael Straczynski
An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.
— Matthew      Lewis, The Monk
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
— Margaret Drabble
You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
— Nelson Algren, Nonconformity
[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
— Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
— Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus and the Secret Sharer
USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
— Gore Vidal
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
— Gustave Flaubert
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
— John Banville
But then why do we write if not to tackle the fears that others look to us to conquer?
— J.F. Penn, Author 2.0 Blueprint
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.
— Dave Eggers, What Is the What
Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.
— Azar Nafisi
To write a novel, you need an iron butt.
— Richard M. Nixon
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.
— Catherine Drinker Bowen
All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washèd it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
— Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion
My writing is how I maintain.
— Mark Salzman, True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.
— Anna Quindlen, Object Lessons
And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.
— Maynard James Keenan
Write when you can't stop writing. Read when you stopped writing!
— Robert Ahaness
Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water
—  it spreads through and colors everything.
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
— David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays
A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.
— Jorge Luis Borges
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
— Richard P. Denney
For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.
— Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
— Neil Gaiman
I'm a drinker with writing problems.
— Brendan Behan
In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.
— Dylan Thomas
Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice. 
— Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun
What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
— Sandra Brown
Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
— Pat Conroy
Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
— Dorothy Day
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
— Marge Piercy
I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.
— Sharon M. Draper
Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could havemade me do it, or prevented me from doing it.
— J.K. Rowling
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
— Fran Lebowitz
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
— Mark Twain
I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Arrogance kills creativity.
— A.M. Riley
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
— Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome
Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
— Alberto Manguel, Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revenge
You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.
— Sarah Gilbert
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
— Louise DeSalvo, Writing As A Way Of Healing: How Telling Stories Transforms Our Lives
To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.
— Dana Stabenow
To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.
— C.K. Webb, Suspense Magazine January 2011
We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.
— Julia Cameron
Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10
— Philip Roth
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
— Gore Vidal
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
— Arthur Holitscher
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
— W. Somerset Maugham
If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.
— Katherine Anne Porter
CHAPTER 2: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSALDO THE APACHEMy name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I'm putting together a special team, and I need me 8 soldiers. 8 Jewish-American soldiers.Now, y'all might've heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.Now, I don't know about y'all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross 5,000 miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin' air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be destroyed. That's why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die.Now, I'm the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance.We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are.And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.And the German won't not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives.And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us.And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with.Sooounds good?
— Quentin Tarantino
I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
— Gustave Flaubert
I'm not a big fan of inspiration. I'm too old to sit and wait for the muse to give me a little kiss... I write a lot, and I'm not afraid to make mistakes or to write badly. I can alsways fix something weak and dull. But I can't fix a blank page.
— Ron Koertge
What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
— Burton Rascoe
File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.
— Antony Johnston
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?~Jack or The Submission
— Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson: Two Plays -- A New Translation
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I've also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I'm getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older — gardening, bell ringing... piano playing... And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me — how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises).
— Robin McKinley
To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.
— Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
— Alfred Kazin