c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
— John Green
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
I need solitude for my writing
—  not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
— Winston S. Churchill
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
— T.S. Eliot
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
— H.P. Lovecraft
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. 
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
— George R.R. Martin
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!
— Lewis Carroll
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...
— Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
— Richard Bach
Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.
— Joss Whedon
Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
— Gloria Steinem
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
— Molière
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
— Gustave Flaubert
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
— Harper Lee
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
— Truman Capote
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
— David Sedaris
You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.
— Coco J. Ginger
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
— André Gide
I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
— Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
— Isaac Asimov
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
— Anaïs Nin
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
— Stephen King
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it
— Charles Bukowski
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
— Franz Kafka
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
— Oscar Wilde
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
— Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. 
— C.S. Lewis
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.
— C.S. Lewis
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
— Abigail Adams
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
— Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!
— Lee Child
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
— George Orwell
Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
— John Waters
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.
— Toni Morrison
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
— Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
— Elmore Leonard, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
— Zora Neale Hurston
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
— Raymond Carver
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
— Stephen King
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
— Robert A. Heinlein
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
— Margaret Atwood
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
— Carlos Fuentes
Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.
— Charles Bukowski
You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Good fiction creates its own reality.
— Nora Roberts, The Stanislaski Brothers: Mikhail and Alex
Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.
— Carolyn See
Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.
— Ernest Hemingway
You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.
— Warren Ellis
I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.
— Craig Claiborne
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
— H.G. Wells
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
— Edgar Allan Poe
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. 
— Benjamin Disraeli
What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.
— Alfred Hitchcock
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
— Terry Pratchett
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
— Nicole Krauss
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
— Tom Waits
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
— Ernest Hemingway
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
— Neil Gaiman
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.", O Magazine, November 2009]
— Junot Díaz
You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.
— Joss Whedon
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
— Edward Albee
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
— Raymond Chandler
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
— André Gide
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
— Nikki Giovanni
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
— George Orwell
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.", July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
— David McCullough
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Only a mediocre person is always at his best. 
— W. Somerset Maugham
You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.
— Junot Díaz
...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
— Markus Zusak
I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think
—  I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
— Stephen King
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
Write what you know.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.
— Cormac McCarthy
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.
— Ernest Hemingway
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.
— Stephenie Meyer, Midnight Sun
Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
— Mark Twain
The desire to write grows with writing.
— Erasmus
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
— William Faulkner
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.
— Matthew Reilly, Area 7
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.
— Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales
A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
— Alice Munro, Selected Stories
If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
— Robert Cormier
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
— Susan Sontag
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.
— Nicole Christie, Falling for the Ghost of You
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
— Henry Ward Beecher
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those I love.I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper. I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear.I write past the embarrassment of exposure.I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal. I write myself out of nightmares.I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings.I write to remember.I write knowing conversations don’t always take place.I write because speaking can’t be reread.I write to sooth a mind that races.I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide.I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long.I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be.I write to provide a legacy.I write to make sense out of senselessness.I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding. I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers.I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time. I write because God loves stories.I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.
— Shannon L. Alder
A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
— Garrison Keillor
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.
— Bill Watterson
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
— Robert McKee
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
— Italo Calvino
If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.This is how we go on.
— Stephen King
nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.
— Charles Bukowski
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
— Elie Wiesel
No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.
— bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.
— John Steinbeck
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
— Stephen King
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
— Octavia E. Butler
When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
— Oscar Wilde
You can't edit a blank page
— Nora Roberts
If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
— Don DeLillo
There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.
— Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
— Winston S. Churchill, Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
— Samuel Johnson
Writing is a delicious agony.
— Gwendolyn Brooks
Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
— Akira Kurosawa
As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
— Sherman Alexie
She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.
— Christopher Poindexter
The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.
— Cameron Dokey
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
— Robert Hass
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
— Arthur Miller
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
— Neil Gaiman
The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.
— Warren Ellis
Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...
— Yasunari Kawabata
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
— Maya Angelou
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
— Isabel Allende
Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
— Patricia A. McKillip
And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
— H.G. Wells
They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.
— James Franco
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
— William Faulkner
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
— Paul Auster
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
— Orson Scott Card
Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again! 
— Dee Marie, Sons of Avalon: Merlin's Prophecy
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
— William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
— Gilles Deleuze
The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.
— Walter Mosley
Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands,innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. 
— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
Ink, a Drug.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy in Spite of Herself
If it's fiction, then it better be true.
— Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
— Françoise Sagan
Imagination is Everything!
— Termina Ashton
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
one does not only wish to be understood when one writes
—  one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.
— Ruskin Bond, The Best of Ruskin Bond
Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
— Ernest Hemingway
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
— Truman Capote
Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain
—  art also exists for compensating pain.
One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.
— Robin McKinley
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. 
— Brenda Ueland
It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.
— Philip Pullman
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
— George Orwell
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
— Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida
I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.
— Rob Thurman
writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
— Ray Bradbury
CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.
— Bill Watterson
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
— Theodore Dreiser
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. 
— Jennifer Weiner