c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Sometimes you like to keep things bottled up, but that is not the best policy.
— Aireen C. Pontillo
we met one strange summerin a regular tangle of sticky websyou had the air of angels sweet but I--drowned with the damned spiritsin lava oceans fearing your--foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes(I swear they are even if you--think otherwise): stormscalm ones, calmer than my--raging coals, empty and deadyou speak of souls like you believealways an optimist in pessimisticskin of ivory and titanium mesh...
— Moonshine Noire
I never swear, Monseigneur. I say Yes or No, and as I am a gentleman, I keep my word.
— Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After
One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
if you speak things into existence, they will become real.. believe me!
— Rakesh Vemulawada
We all need that someone in our life who's going to motivate us and not stress us, and then we need to treat him the same way we want to be treaded, and no lies, we say what we mean and mean what we say. and always try to build together not destroy each other, if the outcome isn't what you expected, at least you can say you tried., but also remember that pressure makes diamonds people. not everything will be easy between you and me and him and her and them. its all give and take.. reward and sacrifice. try to love those who love you, not just the ones who are easiest to love, try to help those who need you, may you will need the help someday. try to forgive those who hurt you, may you hurted someone once upon a time and try to forget those who leave you, may god knew that they aren't good for you. one of my main goals on the planet is to encourage people to empower themselves like what im trying now, i try to makes you positive, to make a positive change in your life, it will never happen unless me or you or him or her make it happen. they said "be the change you want to see in the world" im like that and i would like everyone to be like me.
— Marouane LAASSAFAR
I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.
— Walter Cronkite, A Reporter's Life
We don’t change to believe
—  we believe to change! (el)
Maybe the truth of it all is that we’re just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith is a powerful tool bestowed on all men by God. However, faith cannot be seen but it can be felt. It cannot be touched but it touches all things. Faith cannot be surmounted but it overcomes all challenges; fear, poverty, heartache, disappointments, pains, difficulties and trials disappear by faith.
— Sesan Kareem
You can run from Tokyo to Toronto, from Cairo to Bamako and end your sojourn in Okokomaiko in order to proffer solutions to your life’s challenges, but this will not guarantee you victory. You can decide to be bitter and ignore anything that suggests victory but this will not amount to an ounce of success. However, if you have faith in God; put your trust in Him and rely solely on Him. I assure you that He will take care of your needs and make you a shining light among your peers.
— Sesan Kareem
God wants you to bring glory to his name. He desires you to challenge others with your story becoming glory. He aspires to use your exemplary life as a model to today’s and tomorrow’s generations. Yes, He loves to use your life as a beacon of light and a roadmap to achieve extraordinary feat to others. But all He needs you to do is to be faithful with your faith.
— Sesan Kareem
Faith is to believe in something when common sense tells you not to and situation surrounding you says otherwise.
— Sesan Kareem
More than commitment, dedication, character, discipline, patience, determination, perseverance and prayer, you need faith because you must first belief before you can witness a pragmatic change in your life.
— Sesan Kareem
Everyday, I end up with your chat on top. Everyday, I end with knowing you a bit more. Don't know whether you're mine or not, but everyday is making me the right person to you.
— sbhankar
A great woe underpinning the sorrows of the world today is this: so many people think they are far better than others and they are too righteous than others, and they know far better than others, and such thoughts give them reasons for an otherwise action!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
We don’t find Godin temples and cathedrals.We don’t find Himby standing on a prayer rug or sitting in a pew.God appears when welove someone other than ourselves.And we continue to feel His presence when we do good for others.Because God is not foundin mosques and synagogues.He resides in ourhearts.
— Kamand Kojouri
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
The depths of her thoughts will have you never wanting to surface for air...
— Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Lace and Ruffles
I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Boldness, confidence, and faith will rise in your heart as you realize that God’s supply is always greater than your need!
— Andrew Wommack, A Better Way to Pray
When you are here, God is near.
— Kamand Kojouri
Faith is the bridge from the spiritual realm into the physical realm.
— Andrew Wommack, A Better Way to Pray
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Your love brought me closer to God.
— Kamand Kojouri
A soulmate is a direct pathway to God.
— Kamand Kojouri
God’s existence is reaffirmed once we fall in with another.
— Kamand Kojouri
In general, if we leave out the atheistic fraction of world population that possesses no notable optimistic or positive Qualia of God, the majority of the human species possesses a beneficial Qualia of God enriched with blissful sentiments.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Do not speak wickedness, Tania. God can yet deliver us, if He chooses. If not, we shall glorify Him with our deaths. Jonah Havalseth
— Sandra Kopp, Warrior Queen of Ha-Ran-Fel
When it's clear that we have a commitment to God that comes before anything else in our lives, most people will respect us even if they don't share our faith.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
Dear Charles, she wrote. After writing to express my appreciation for all the generosity of our friends, I would be remiss indeed if I did not include a missive to you. Out of all the new blessings in my new life, the one I thank God for the most is you. I thank you for writing to me through Genteel Correspondence, and for choosing me out of all the other women eager for adventure in the wild west.  I thank you for your kindness, and your gentleness toward me. Only very strong men can be gentle. I thank you for sharing your home and your life with me. I thank you for inventing delicious breakfasts. And chicory flavored coffee. And prayers that ease my mind and inspire my spirit and lift my heart. For your smile and the way you hold your hat in your hands. For the things you say and how you say them.  Did you know that I pray for you each day? I do. I pray for your safety and happiness.  Yours in Christ,  Rose
— Jan Holly, Marriage by Mail
If your plan will do more harm than good, then God will not permit it
— Aireen C. Pontillo
God not da faddah, he just the spoiled moody child, but you got to go t'rough him to get to da real power, his mama, Mot'er God. She da real Almighty! She run da heavens alone. Original single parent. When somethin' bad happen, usually mean she let God try his hand, and he screw up plenny. You need something important, you go directly Mot'er God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph? Dey just small potatoes, part of the chorus, neh?
— Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues
Other than the substantial physiological impact of prayer/meditation, there is another much simpler mind-body intervention that helps all religious and spiritual individuals in all walks of life, regardless of whether they pray regularly or not. It is commonly known as faith.
— Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience
Truth is the strongest weapon against the darkness of lies! EL
— Evinda Lepins, Back to Single
Christian education begins where evangelism ends, helping believers grow in their faith.
— Perry G. Downs, Teaching for Spiritual Growth: An Introduction to Christian Education
The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you.
— C.S. Lewis
Death is an opportunity to shed all guilt
—  to step away from the dogma and contrivances of mankind
There is only one power greater than fear, and that is faith. Use your faith to move the mountains that are standing in your way today!
— Theresa Lewis
It's time for you to move on and realize that there is so much more to your life than what you see. Let go of your past and never re-live it again. You must take a leap of faith and take hold of all the Amazing and Beautiful things you deserve in life!
— Theresa Lewis, Rising Above Adversity: Finding God's Purpose Through Your Pain
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
— Ernest Hemingway
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
— Toni Morrison
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
— Madeleine L'Engle
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
— Stephen King
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
— Anaïs Nin
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
— Saul Bellow
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
— Robert Frost
Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
— William Faulkner
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
— Stephen King
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
— Stephen King
Don't tell me the moon is shining
—  show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
— E.L. Doctorow
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
— Frank Herbert
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
— Philip Pullman
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
— Henry David Thoreau
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
— Neil Gaiman
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
The first draft of anything is shit.
— Ernest Hemingway
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
— Anne Frank
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
— W. Somerset Maugham
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
— Stephen King
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
— Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
— Beatrix Potter
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
— William Wordsworth
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
— Neil Gaiman
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
— Franz Kafka
You can make anything by writing.
— C.S. Lewis
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
— Neil Gaiman
A word after a word after a word is power.
— Margaret Atwood
You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
— Ray Bradbury
I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. 
— Joss Whedon
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
— Annie Proulx
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
— Virginia Woolf
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
— Caroline Gordon
Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.
— Philip José Farmer
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
— Neil Gaiman
Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.
— Daphne du Maurier
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
— Jack London
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
— Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
— Anaïs Nin
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
— Franz Kafka
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
— Meg Cabot
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold
—  they change the world into words.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
— Lorrie Moore
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
— Ray Bradbury
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
— Anaïs Nin
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. 
— Sharon Olds
People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
— Joss Whedon
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
— Albert Camus
Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
— Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
— Stephen King
I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
— Mark Twain
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
— John Steinbeck
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.
— Carl Sagan
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
— Hermann Hesse
Write what should not be forgotten.
— Isabel Allende
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
— Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.
— Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
— James A. Michener
Find out the reason that commands you to write
—  see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I hate writing, I love having written.
— Dorothy Parker
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
— Pablo Picasso
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." (1980)]
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
— George Orwell
You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.
— Richard Price
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
— Stephen King
great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.
— Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. 
— Lady Gaga
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
— Christopher Hitchens
Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.", Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]
— John Green
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
— Cornelia Funke
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]
— Franz Kafka
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
— Ernest Hemingway
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
— William Faulkner
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
— Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero
—  but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
— Thomas Jefferson
All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
— Isaac Asimov
Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.
— Joss Whedon
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
— Margaret Atwood
When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.
— Neil Gaiman
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
— Anthony Trollope
Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]
— Toni Morrison
The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility
—  that is my burden. And even I grow tired.
I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
— Roald Dahl
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
— Ernest Hemingway
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
— Ray Bradbury
You can fix anything but a blank page.
— Nora Roberts
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.
— Jennifer Weiner
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
— Chuck Palahniuk
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
— Franz Kafka
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.", February 25, 1933]
— Cyril Connolly
Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible
— Vladimir Nabokov
A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
— Sidney Sheldon
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
— Alice Walker
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
— Voltaire
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
— Alan W. Watts
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic
—  it is not for everybody
It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Ideas aren't magical
—  the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
A book is a suicide postponed.
— Emil M. Cioran
My books are water
—  those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
— Jules Renard
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
— E.B. White
Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
— Stephen King
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
— Brenda Ueland
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.
— George R.R. Martin
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Write about the emotions you fear the most.
— Laurie Halse Anderson
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
— Jackie Collins
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight
—  don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. 
— Agatha Christie
I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
— Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
With writing, we have second chances.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
— Ernest Hemingway
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
— Paul Valéry
I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
— Philip Pullman
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
— E.M. Forster
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
— Charles Bukowski
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.
— Martin Luther
One should use common words to say uncommon things
— Arthur Schopenhauer
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I don't profess any religion
—  I don't think it’s possible that there is a God
What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
— Ted Hughes
Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.
— George Gordon Byron
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)
— Colette
When writing a novel a writer should create living people
—  people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten
—  none are undeservedly remembered.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
— Oscar Wilde
I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives.The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.”The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get.The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said.The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.”But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.”My bones said, “Write the poems.
— Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase: By Andrea Gibson
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly
—  sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~
— Dr. Seuss
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
— Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka
You are what you write.
— Helvy Tiana Rosa, Risalah Cinta
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
— Charles Baudelaire
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
— Joan Didion
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.
— Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing
A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
— Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind
The story is always better than your ability to write it.
— Robin McKinley