c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured.“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”“You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.
— Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
Many people fail in their career, business and relationship, and others get stuck because of their inability to make quality decisions.
— Nkem Paul, The Art of Achievement and Fulfillment: Fundamental Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Turn Dreams Into Reality!
The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.
— Bono, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas
-Elves never make any major decision until they have thought the matter over for at least a year or two, gone round to all their friends and relatives and discussed the problem, done research, read tomes, consulted the sages.-And what happens then?- By then they've usually forgotten what it was they meant to do in the first place.
— Margaret Weis
You can't make the right decision, but you can always make the dicision right.
— Thomas Murdock
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what could have been. It’s too unbearable.
— Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
I had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.
— Neil Jordan, Mistaken
I know when something is too important to be decided by logic.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
Jesus told us to make disciples, not decisions.
— John Pereira
It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, `I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, `You will, though.
— Tom McNeal, To Be Sung Underwater
Writing is a struggle against silence.
— Carlos Fuentes
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
— Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings
People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.
— Delphine de Vigan, No and Me
Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail
—  how he wrote and it seemed good
The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage.
— Shatrujeet Nath
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.
— Christopher Hopper
Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.
— Lauren Oliver
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
— Haruki Murakami
Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.
— Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale
Working on it.
— Paul Aertker
I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.
— Alan Bradley, Speaking from Among the Bones
For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you've done on the book so far won't be much comfort, because so much of it will be insufferable crap, until the very last moment, when you figure out how to fix it and everything comes together.
— Kristin Cashore
I write not because I want to but because I am destined to.
— Jules Haigler
Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly trivial strand, only to discover it is attached to a longer strand; that one in turn is attached to an even bigger one. Sometimes, I find have tugged a whole, hidden tapestry of my past into view, one thread at a time.
— Alice Bag
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
(Dorothy) Dunnett is the master of the invisible, particularly in her later books. Where is this tension coming from? Why is this scene so agonizing? Why is this scene so emotional? Tension and emotion pervade the books, sometimes almost unbearably, yet when you look at the writing, at the actual words, there's nothing to show that the scene is emotional at all. I think it is because Dunnett layers her novels, meaning that each event is informed by what has come before (and what came before that, and what came before that) but Dunnett doesn't signpost in the text that this is happening, leaving it to the reader to bring the relevant information to the table
— C.S. Pacat
There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
— W. Somerset Maugham
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
— Jodi Picoult
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
— John Fowles
The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
— Val Kovalin
Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.
— Chris Baty
Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.
— Heather Grace Stewart
Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.
— Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.
— Carla H. Krueger
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
— Tom Clancy
The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.
— Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi
To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.
— Strunk Jr., William, The Elements of Style
Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?”She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.”“What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her.“Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied.“Choices,” he echoed.“Of who they become.
— Nancy Holder, Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization
When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start -- so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing it seems almost physically from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.
— P.D. James, Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment Of Autobiography
A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.
— Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm
When you hurt one of your characters and then type faster to finish a scene while saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!
— A.R. Fagundes, Goddess Save the King
The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.
— Mark Twain
By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It’s one of those times when the question is its own answer…. The writing is itself the solution to the inability to write!
— Yael Shahar, Returning: Reflections & Resources on Teshuvah
Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!
— Avijeet Das
The structured form of an outline helps us to keep track of all plot lines in a series, and of course, this diminishes the chance of plot holes for us.
— Lydia Larue
Don’t hold back and save stuff for the next book. Put everything you have into the one you’re writing, - Michael Connelly
— Sue Ward Drake
You only fail if you stop writing.RAY BRADBURY
— Sue Ward Drake, Hear No Evil
As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
— Avijeet Das
It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.
— Andrew M Greeley
At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.
— Avijeet Das
A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.
— Peter Straub
Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.
— Ben Tolosa, Masterplan Your Success
I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
— M.V. Carey
Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.
— M.V. Carey
More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
— M.V. Carey
Writing involves many [acts] tasks, not just generating text
— Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.
— Ian McEwan
I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.
— Peter Straub
Good writing is rhythm.
— William Peter Blatty
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
— Flannery O'Connor
But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.
— Dani Shapiro, Slow Motion
If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
— Ann Patchett
think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
— Irvine Welsh
I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.
— Chigozie Obioma
It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.
— Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming
Writing is the act of finding out what I think.
— Stephen King
Being a writer, I think, is much like being a parent or a pet parent in my case. I love all of my characters equally, even if I want you to hate them, I love them. If you don't love all your characters you're not doing it right.
— Ellie Elisabeth
I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.
— Stephen King
Writers don't kill characters. Characters kill characters.
— MariaLisa deMora
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
— William Inge
The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers.
— Eskay Teel, Alice in Worcestershire: Brummie girls do cry
Don't let others define your dreams.
— Tres Buffalo
Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaks—the dales and glens, rivers, forests, and other features that distinguish one mountain landscape from another... is where the artistry and intrigue of the writing process lives. As the writer sets out into the story, leaving behind those high points—the beginning, a twist here and there, the climax, and, if perhaps a bit indistinct for the distance to cover, the end—entering the vale below, all manner of things can happen the writer never intended or expected at the onset.
— Brett Armstrong
I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own?  I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]
— Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.
— C.S. Lewis
When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
— Cheryl Strayed
No writer ever puts into words which he or she thinks is unnecessary
—  learning how to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.
When in doubt, go the scandalous route.
— Kilian Grey
Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.
— Linda Flower, Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing
Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.
— Joshua Wolf Shenk
To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That’s why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer’s dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.
— Wendy J. Dunn
We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.
— duncan b. barlow
Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.
— Samuel S. Vaughan, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do
Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.
— Cheryl L. Ilov
Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
— James Baldwin
There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.
— Tarang Sinha
Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
— William Goldman
Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.
— Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology
I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it
—  I believe I understood it then.
Writing a novel is like taking a long cross-country journey. The hardest part is getting going, making sure you have all the items you need to take with you, double- and triple-checking that the route you’re taking is the best way. So often you leave your driveway and start north when you realize you actually needed to head southwest. I’ve never written a novel without a certain number of false starts. And it never seems to get easier. Part of me thinks it only gets harder.
— Travis Thrasher, Three Roads Home
When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The Paraclete and "Book of Martha" narratives were ultimately versions of the dream of "fixing" of the human species that had driven (and stymied) the Parables books: "On the one hand," she writes in her journal, "I want to write fix-the-world scenario. I seem to need to write them. The fact that I don't believe in them--don't believe humanity is fixable--does create a problem
— Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler
I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.
— Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia
Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it?
— Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction
Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.
— Stewart Stafford
Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are just . . . writing crap and doodling and trying to have an idea and surfing the internet and hoping like hell not to get so distracted that you give up. Worse? Those five miles are lined with brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba waiting to talk to only you and really good novels to read. Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it. The more often I run the five miles, the fitter I become. And the fitter I become, the easier the run begins to feel and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road seems. I mean, how long has it been there? More important, as I get fitter, I can run faster. And the faster I can run, the faster I can get to that door. The faster you can too, writers out there. When you sit down to write every day, it becomes easier and easier to tap into that creative space inside your mind. The faster I can get to that door, the quicker I can get to the good stuff.
— Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person
Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the I’m a Fraud phase. You go through the I’ll Never Finish phase. And every once in a while you think, What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it’s received as such?
— Lin-Manuel Miranda
But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it’s like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren’t allowed to make mistakes.
— Karina Halle, Smut
We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Attention and focus are essential skills for writers in a noise-filled world.
— Anne H. Janzer, The Writer's Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
— Stephen King
The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
— Mark Twain
My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.
— Benjamin Haydon
Writing's in the nouns.
— Lori Roy
Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.
— Susan Marie
Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.
— Elena Ferrante
The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."Or:"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.""The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us in our own experience. It is a way to move from passive to active. We may still be the victims of circumstance, but by our understanding those circumstances we place events within the ongoing context of our own life, that is, the life we "own".
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
When we write from the inside out rather than the outside in, when we write about what most concerns us rather than about what we feel might sell, we often write so well and so persuasively that the market responds to our efforts.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
I do not put in long hours at the keys - or very seldom. Instead, I snatch time. I write in the crannies of my life.
— Julia Cameron
We humans are the only creatures on the planet capable of articulating worlds which are contrary, even in the most minor way, to reality. Every story, I think, begins there. With a dream. A fantasy.
— L.M. Halloran
To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
— Orhan Pamuk, My Father's Suitcase: The Nobel Lecture
When we make time to write, we can do it anytime, anywhere.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
There’s a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate, but it better be a strong, clear line.' As a teacher, I took that advice to heart. As a writer, I asked, “'But what happens if the line isn’t strong or clear?
— Joseph Kenyon
He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.
— Tom Stoppard
Grab for time to write instead of wait for time.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, How to Make a Book
To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, How to Make a Book
Attributing to another author, "Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
— Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 2
Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline
— Gina Barreca, "If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?": Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times
The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
— Stephen King
You haven't seen yourself until you look through the eyes of your characters.~Tanela Hicks
— Tanela Hicks
You haven't seen yourself until you look through the eyes of your characters."~Tanela Hicks
— Tanela Hicks
You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. Be it the perfect murder, robbing a bank or owning your own company. I don’t go along with Prince Charles’ maxim that everyone should know their place and limitations.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
You haven't seen yourself until you look through the eyes of your characters.
— Tanela Hicks
Don't be afraid to get off the internet, the answers aren't all there. You may have to ask a cop about the kickback from a shotgun, or how sweaty they get in summer wearing body armor. Or what color blood is in the moonlight, or the vibrations through a serrated knife’s handle you feel in your fingers when you are hacking through somebody’s neck and hit cartilage.
— Dan Alatorre
I come up with an idea and I’ll start throwing little suggestions for possible scenes into a folder, but before I seriously sit down to write Word One, they whole outline is finished. Sue me. It works.
— Dan Alatorre
The more time you can put between you and your manuscript, the more fresh your eyes become and the more mistakes you’ll catch. Let a chapter rest for a day, you’ll see ways to improve it. Let your completed book rest a month or more and you’ll see stuff that’s long or that you want to skip. Read it out loud to get rid of awkward phrases and listen to your critique partners if they are good.
— Dan Alatorre
I write in complete silence using only two fingers so I can’t type faster than I edit at the same time, saving me from having to go back. Although it does create a lot of capitalization issues. And punctuation problems. I didn’t say it was a good routine.
— Dan Alatorre
It’s amazing how my mind opens up right when I have to run on the treadmill. I’ve finished three chapters rather than run a mile.
— Dan Alatorre
I get up at 4am or 5am and write for a few hours before the rest of the world wakes up. And I don’t drink caffeine. That combination is basically a deal breaker for every other author I know. I don’t usual check email, Facebook or Twitter until at least 6:30am, either, another killer for most authors.
— Dan Alatorre
I've found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard bxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the 'Single Ladies' dance. I know. Isn't that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Write your own part. It's the only way I've ever gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and nobody can stop you.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
— Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
They say a picture's worth a thousand words, but with me it always ends up being well over a hundred thousand.
— Luke  Taylor
And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.
— Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
You must write as if each word is a precious drop of blood, or a tear to be saved in a glass phial.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture
—  it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.
His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.
— James Salter
It was a dark and stormy night. . .perfect for staying indoors and writing a novel!
— Sandra Kopp
When you know what you want to communicate, ask yourself: Who is my audience and what does he know about the subject?
— Sandra Lamb
All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.
— Anthony Doerr
Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop," said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk....
— Barry Hughart
For people who make up stories for a living, that is the ultimate success: knowing that, when the book closes, when the series ends, the adventure is not over. It goes on without the creator, in the minds of the people who love it. You can’t stop the signal. Once it’s broadcast, it continues on forever, pulsing past star clusters, lighting up new worlds, collecting new fans, till the end of time itself.
— Sharon Shinn, Whedonistas!: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them
I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content—kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on. I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don’t want to get somewhere, you just don’t want to fall off your board. I think the equivalent of balance is tone, so I think tone gives birth to the story.
— Etgar Keret
Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting!
— Veronica Purcell, I'm Kita Duran
Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.
— Natasha Lester
Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Developing your voice takes... time and practice.
— Darynda Jones
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
— C.G. Jung
The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.
— Claudia Bakker
Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.
— Eliza Green
A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write.
— Tyrean Martinson, A JUMBLE OF 500+ WRITING PROMPTS: More than 500 Writing Prompts
Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.
— Gloria D. Gonsalves
Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.
— Luke  Taylor
I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?
— Hilary Mantel
Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.
— Paulo Coelho
Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.
— Gudjon Bergmann, The Author's Blueprint