c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.
— Haruki Murakami
Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.
— Janet Malcolm
There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
— Caleb C. Colton
I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.
— Gudjon Bergmann, The Author's Blueprint
It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied.
— Gudjon Bergmann, The Author's Blueprint
Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.
— Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted
Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession
— Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal
When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.
— Alvi Syahrin
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture — still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.
— Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.
— Armineonila M.
Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
— Amy Poehler, Yes Please
There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.
— Robert Frost
I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
— William Faulkner
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
— Virginia Woolf
The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing
—  when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.
Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.
— Adam Langer
There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to be nurtured, and this desire to finish becomes more about being a good student than about finishing something interesting. Where does work ethic fit in with writing? I think that's pretty complicated from one writer to the next. You need some kind of work ethic, but what does it look like for you?
— Aimee Bender
...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.
— Pete Dexter, The Paperboy
Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing." "What book?" I say. Then : "Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._________I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet. In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it.
— Phillip Margulies, Belle Cora
The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins
— Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.
— John Irving, The World According to Garp
There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.
— Darynda Jones
If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.
— Sandra Elaine Scott
Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic
Humor is so subjective, not everyone is going to get what you are peddling. Others will be offended when what you meant no offense whatsoever. Those are the stakes. You have to be able to stand up for yourself and what you’ve written. Comedy pushes limits, makes people uncomfortable, and is a natural reaction to the environment. Otherwise, as I said, it is forced. Let it flow and give your characters permission to cross a line or two, but only if you can take the heat afterward.
— Darynda Jones
When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.
— Stephen King
A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.
— Darynda Jones
And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.
— Darynda Jones
The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.
— Jonathan Maas
In the 'Life' of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. "She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting," Cross wrote.
— Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch
It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else — things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things — but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Do what you love...
— Lise Cartwright
Briefer is better, so learn to write tight
— Angela Elwell Hunt
The challenge of the writer is to transform—artistically and imaginatively—a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.
— Hillel F. Damron
Trawling through a dusty attic of my addled memory I found that I’d been rather in a lot of daft and amusing situations, so I set about writing them down. The only problem being that I was a lot better at telling stories than writing them, probably because telling them involves a lot less typing and a lot more shouting.
— Guy Pratt
Your experiences are the foundation for your story
—  your imagination takes it from there.
There's nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself." Professor Piper
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
— Nelson Algren
The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.
— Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty
At it's best,the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then - and only then - it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.
— The Writing Life
A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.
— Don Roff
What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
— Ernest Hemingway
Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.
— Stuart Dybek
Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.
— Midnight Taylor
An opportunity lost may have motivated us to find a satisfying alternative. Adversity or suffering may have taught us certain important skills. Some writers have felt new appreciation for their lives after surviving a serious illness or disability. A fortunate outcome does not invalidate the unfortunate aspect.
— Nan Merrick Phifer, Memoirs of the Soul: A Writing Guide
Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
— Jennifer Hudson Taylor
People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you
— Sebastian Faulks
The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.
— Pamela Erens
Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
— Jaclyn Moriarty, The Spell Book of Listen Taylor
I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis
To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
— Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
— Rowan Ricardo Phillips
These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.
— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.
— Anna Quindlen
I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.
— Betsy Byars
Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.
— Peter Selgin, 179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers
Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how bloody hard it was. It was like having an intense, frustrating love affair with a capricious, gorgeous, and often mean-spirited woman.He loved every moment of it.
— Nora Roberts, Key of Knowledge
It’s very hard — weirdly hard — to clear your mind of all that crap so that you can just sit down and write and find that place where you’re just involved and enjoying the imaginary place you’ve discovered. All the other “problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.
— Dan Chaon
I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.
— Ripley Patton
Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul...you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn't snap.
— Judy Croome
I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It's easier to dance when you finish writing.
— Diego Ramos
What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.
— Nancy Zafris
Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.
— Elizabeth Rusch
You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate. Nothing that you write is pointless, useless, or unnecessary. The product requires the process. The good days may be more enjoyable, but the tough ones are the ones they’re built upon.
— Robin    Black
When I sleep tonight I dream of what I will imagine tomorrow.
— T.A. Uner
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.
— Mo Yan
Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.
— Ron Brackin
[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.
— Kate Wright, Screenwriting is Storytelling: Creating an A-List Screenplay that Sells!
On some days, writing is wonderful. On the days when it is wonderful, it feels like you are the God of a universe that the rest of the world is not yet privy to. And then on some days, it is not wonderful; those days when nothing is coming and the cursor seems to be openly mocking you, blinking out ‘YOU SUCK AT WRITING AND YOU’RE UGLY AS BALLS’ in Morse code.
— Leigh Whannell
The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased...
— Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
— Chuck Wendig
People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education.
— Muriel Spark, Aiding and Abetting
There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.
— Gerard de Marigny, Rescue From Sana'a
It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far.
— Khaled Hosseini
So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes – well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.
— George Saunders
Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.
— Seamus Heaney
And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit.
— Margaret Laurence, Heart of a Stranger
When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.
— John Steinbeck
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.
— Kevin James Breaux
I am a perfectionist in spirit
— Bob D'Eith
Never stop writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it’s integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how much time you spend doing it, whether it’s for business or pleasure. Integrate your craft into your every day life, and you’ll be as good as gold.
— Leigh Hershkovich
Books most certainly don't write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.
— Solomon Woytowich
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
— Gary Reilly, Home for the Holidays
Inspiration do not come and cannot be found, it has to exist - somewhere, somehow. Do believe that what you are doing is the most important thing in this world, and do believe that your words can be magical. Because I know they can be and I know they are. If you feel that you are lost in your own mind, don’t think, just write. Sometimes we have to erase our thoughts and memories to gain enough strength to be able to write down our inner thoughts. If you don’t know what it is, if you think it’s ridiculous or silly, you’re definitely on the right way. Sometimes you will hate your words and sometimes you will love them. This is the fun part of greatness in which the other part definitely will be your devil. Remember; with greatness comes obstacles.
— Liv-Christine Hoem
Writing, is not a race. Is to distill the soul letter by letter in a slow and delicate process that will take years.
— J.E. Negrete
Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.
— Moira Katson
Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.
— William Souder
The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!
— Lori Lesko
The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.
— Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm
The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
— George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it’s printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.
— Greg Kihn
A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?
— Mary Papas, Take Off Your Mask
The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.
— Stephen King, Misery
If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.
— Larry Correia
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
— Iain Banks
Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book..... just start with a word!
— Mark Pettinger, The Decalogue
Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.
— T.E. Grau
In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
— Ray Bradbury
Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.
— Ken Scott, Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell?
When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
— Roger Ebert, Life Itself
No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.
— Steven Wright, Steven Wright Humor
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Many a good story has been found in the bottom of a decent Rioja.
— Ken Scott
Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?
— Stephen Fry, Revenge
The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.
— Mike Carey, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice
The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality.
— Ray Rhamey, Flogging the Quill: Crafting a Novel that Sells
Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.
— Hal Zina Bennett
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
— Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.
— Lian Hearn
Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.
— Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book
A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.
— Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book
If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.
— Mark Twain
You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).
— Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.
— David G.  Allen
I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.
— E.W. Hornung, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman
There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ‘pencil work’ as John O’Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.
— Malcolm Cowley
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?
— Martijn Benders
He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.
— Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement
Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.
— Andromeda Edison
To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.
— Christopher Stocking
...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.
— Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale
Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.
— Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book
I believe that what we want to write wants to be written
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
— Jonathan Carroll
I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.
— Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946
— Henri Matisse
Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.
— Dorothy L. Sayers
I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.
— Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book
I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack
— Kim Cormack
...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...
— Umberto Eco
I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.
— Sheila Hageman, Stripping Down: A Memoir
Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.
— Sterling Lord, Lord of Publishing: A Memoir
Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.
— C. Kennedy
A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.
— Wally Lamb, I'll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison
For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.
— Shandy L. Kurth
I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision
—  a complex of emotions
I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.
— Joyce Carol Oates
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
— Ernest Hemingway
I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
It’s like when you’re excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means you’re happy, too.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead