c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.
— Avijeet Das
Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years!
— Avijeet Das
But what is life without a passion?
— Avijeet Das
Things that only a writer would understand—you’re writing a character—you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.
— Lisa Marbly-Warir
Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!
— Avijeet Das
Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
— Avijeet Das
Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.
— Avijeet Das
We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing this trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.
— duncan b. barlow
If you don’t write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.
— Sahara Sanders, INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels
When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents’ house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer.
— Sahara Sanders
Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.
— Charles Bukowski
Write only if you wish to read it again and again...
— Ramana Pemmaraju
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Why do I do it to myself? Why don't I get an ordinary job?
— Philip  Tucker
The closest to my heart is not just one book - it’s the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, “Gods’ Food,” is already available in English.
— Sahara Sanders
Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life.
— Sahara Sanders, Gods’ Food Novel
The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.
— Sahara Sanders
Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.
— Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers
Having authored numerous and pretty versatile write-ups, I can’t say that anything other than my soul, heart and life experience can be called a prominent part of every book I ever wrote
— Sahara Sanders
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.
— Paul Haggis
It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
A good writer should be able to communicate to the reader, 'I know your life. I know what you have truly experienced. It’s not right or wrong. It’s survival. It’s making mistakes, and trying to redeem yourself. It’s imperfections, and trying to make yourself better. It’s outrages, and crimes, and insults, which often are not righted, which you have to fix yourself, in your own mind, in your own heart, so that you are not poisoned'.
— Sergio Troncoso, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories and Portraits
A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
— Graham Greene
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Writing is hard…It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it’s no longer a hobby, it’s no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.
— Karina Halle, Smut
Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.
— Mary Lawrence, The Alchemist's Daughter
A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.
— Stephen King, Misery
A voice is a product of the writer’s own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers’ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer’s voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer’s pitch from other wordsmiths’ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I write to remind me of the experiences, fictional or non-fictional, that flows a bit of selfless truths. For the me in the ‘I’, or the me through your eyeballs, it is a serum to separate the lumpiness in my heart.
— James Emlund
I have come to learn, that when people of money and power organize to set upon to break a person they seek to silence, and the person seems but a shadow of what they were, under the endless barrage, in the end when laid to rest, the dignity, compassion and presence of the person somehow endures, and their words awaken to speak clearer than before.As if torches ignite, when their flame is gone,and the light of their truth,Is brilliantly lit and once more born.
— Tom Althouse
Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.
— Nora Ephron
Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It’s amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.
— Pierce Brown
Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.
— Gina McKnight, The Blackberry Patch
Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.
— E. L. Tenenbaum
I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.
— Veronica Purcell
As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.
— Steven Chopade
Writers are explorers who find new worlds and use words to bring them to our reality.
— D. Anne Paris, Driven By Love
This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I’ve been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword…the analogy is a bit muddled, but it’s in there somewhere.
— Willow Madison
The most we can hope for when we write anything is dazzling imperfection. The least we can hope for is accolades from one or two people who don't know us. Spending all afternoon on "the right word" is probably foolish (though I've done it many times), but then again, it may not be. There may be people out there who'll read that nearly-perfect sentence (or paragraph), with its "right word," and they'll nod and smile and say to themselves, "Hey, that's not too bad.
— T.M. Wright
Rejection is no badge of honour.
— Johnny Rich
Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.
— Paul Auster
The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
— Sylvia Townsend Warner
Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.
— Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
— Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography
We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Your dreams don’t stop being dreams because of circumstances.
— Jason E. Hodges
What's my favorite part that I've written? That’s like asking me to choose which of my kids is least ugly!
— Matthew Catania
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
— Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography
There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.
— Jason E. Hodges
To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
— Chris Campanioni, Tourist Trap
A poet’s words are like mortar to the bricks of society.
— Jason E. Hodges
As a writer, you can’t get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn’t want to know.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
A Writer Must Have Text Appeal
— Khaled Talib
Destroying the planet is like stepping from a moving train and thinking it will all work out.
— Jason E. Hodges
I don’t put that pressure on myself (to write every day), but I do tend to write every day. It’s not pressure—it’s pressure release.
— Roxane Gay
Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.
— James     Baldwin
Time heals all wounds
—  some broken hearts -- and most cases of writer's block.
There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
I don’t think there’s a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that’s what the best writing does, that’s what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It’s not about you. Whether you’re a genius or an idiot savant. It’s about the work. The work is more important than you. So it’s not about back-claps and plaudits and “isn’t that author smart.” It’s about, “this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I’m lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well.” Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways.
— Colin Fleming
Art uses truth and beauty—both of which can be quite ugly, even as that ugliness is transcended—to foster change, growth, love, perception, friendship. Something that doesn’t do that can be great. But I wouldn’t call it art […]
— Colin Fleming
Publish a book before you’re too old to read it without glasses.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine’s Day.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
When I write, I can be hear. And known. But nobody has to look at me. Nobody has to see me at all.
— Norah Raleigh Baskin
Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . . how they eke out some measure of freedom and personal space and integrity . . . trying to negotiate their way toward some sort of, if not happiness, then at least accommodation or peace with themselves.
— Ben Fountain
It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've got to approach it with a lot of respect and humility. You owe it to the people and experience you're trying to understand. It's not a casual thing.
— Ben Fountain
. . . any one episode, or even moment, in a person’s life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we’ve found of approaching that kind of complexity.
— Ben Fountain
I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven’t had firsthand access to. There’s an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there’s also knowledge that real damage is being done—this attitude of “Oh, what the hell,” this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It’s an unknowingness, an unawareness . . . Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things . . . It’s an extremely blindered experience of the world.
— Ben Fountain
The way my mind flows is conducive to self-learning. I do better obsessively studying various writers and writing techniques and writing theories on my own than I would do if I were in a classroom and the professor was telling me (and 20 other students at the same time) to study these same things. Even if the professor told us to study the exact things I would otherwise be studying on my own, I would have a much harder time applying myself and focusing and taking anything the professor assigned seriously. That’s just the way my mind works–my fear of groupthink, my desire toward (passion for, obsession with) uniqueness and originality and the creation of new things. By studying things on my own, I might arrive at the exact same place others arrive at as they study amongst their peers–but to my mind, this would be okay. I at least would have arrived there (at those thoughts, at those techniques, at those ideas and approaches and whatever-else-have-you) on my own. And that’s just me.
— JM Tohline
Whenever people ask me, "How are your books doing?" or, "How is your book doing?" I just say, "It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author.
— C. JoyBell C.
Makebelieve is a writer's best friend.
— Solange nicole
I don’t know’,” he said. “Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer. I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship.
— John William Tuohy, No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care
A story is a part of the writer's soul, told to the world.
— T.A. Uner
As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.
— Fennel Hudson, A Waterside Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 2
Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
— E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.
— Rob Bignell, Editor
The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
When I told my teachers I wanted to be a writer, alot of them encouraged me to lower my expectations and to be more realistic. So I rode away on my magical, winged horse, spraying faerie dust behind me, and laughing manically as I went.
— M.E. Vaughan
Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.
— Don Roff
Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...
— R.D. Ronald
Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.
— Ron Brackin
The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.
— Daniel Ionson
Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
— Sherry Thomas
When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
— King Samuel Benson
The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcendthem. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.
— Joy Williams
Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.
— Ray Bradbury
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".
— Enrique Vila-Matas
When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Writer's a lovers quarrel - encounters breathe the quill...
— Neisha Alana Haora
If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims.
— Amélie Nothomb, Hygiène de l'assassin
He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.
— Kate DiCamillo, Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
— Chris Campanioni, In Conversation
You will not publish 100% of the books you don’t write.
— M. Kirin
There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.
— M. Kirin
When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.
— Tom Althouse, The Frowny Face Cow
You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.
— Peter Bowen
The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.
— Jebreel Nahaary
The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.
— Jebreel Nahaary
Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.
— M. Kirin
Writing is a little bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Then you do it for money.
— Molière
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
— Doris Lessing
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.
— Amélie Nothomb, Life Form
The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.
— J.L. Bond
A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
— Ernest Hemingway
I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far.""What stuff is that?" he'd asked her."We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city.
— John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
— Thomas Burger
It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.
— Alan Dapre, The Finders
Writing is what happens when the words in your head are overpowered by the words in your heart.
— J.L. Bond
Introduction of deus ex machina is a tell-tale sign of sloppy plotting.
— Mike Mehalek, Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction
I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.
— Mary  Stewart, Thornyhold
Writing is what happens when the words in your head are overpowered by the words in your heart."J.L. Bond
— J.L. Bond
The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination." J.L. Bond
— J.L. Bond
Writin’ Is Fightin'!
— Ismael Reed
He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they’ve yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.
— Allan Gurganus
You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.
— Sam Shepard, True West
I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.
— James Thurber
Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.
— Brian A. McBride
Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
— Catherynne M. Valente
My mother, who is a pianist and a fine artist, purchased a piano for me. Twice. This was back when I was a small girl. Pianos, of course, came complete with the quintessential piano teacher who whacked my hand with a stick each time I struck the wrong key. I learned a few pieces, yes, but eventually my pen compelled me to write too much and the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind compelled me to climb trees too often. Sorry mom. Coincidentally, books come from trees and flipping the pages sounds like wind through leaves... hhhmmmm... I guess I’m still just climbing trees now, but in a different way!
— C. JoyBell C.
There are times you wake up in the middle of the night, fingers hit the keyboard and you allow words to flow. That is a writer.
— Jenn E., My Funny Valentine
Why do writers write? Why do actors act? Why do painters paint? It doesn't pay much, unless you're very successful. It's who we are.
— Lori Lesko
As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigorous dramatization of story
— Richard Yates
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I'm a grown up, they call me a writer.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
I don’t do math.
— Buffy Andrews
I'm trying to give my character voice but he won't speak.
— Buffy Andrews
Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict?
— Buffy Andrews
Rejection. Rejection. You can't handle rejection!
— Buffy Andrews
Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better.
— Buffy Andrews
If you see it in Strunk and White it's so.
— Buffy Andrews
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
— Joyce Carol Oates
To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.
— Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know
I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
— Buffy Andrews
You say you're a writer but you're depressed. Not an excuse
—  write from there. Write some depressing sh*t. Believe me. You will have plenty of readers who can relate. Remember writers write.
Sometimes the writing just comes and we're like, oh yeah. Gotta love when that happens.
— Buffy Andrews
Me to characters: talk to me people.
— Buffy Andrews
Good editors are priceless.
— Buffy Andrews
If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble!
— Buffy Andrews
Show me the contract.
— Buffy Andrews
A tweet a day keeps writer's block away.
— Buffy Andrews
A cliffhanger is when ...
— Buffy Andrews
Climax: It's all downhill from here.
— Buffy Andrews
Writer. Another word for poor.
— Buffy Andrews
Write on!
— Buffy Andrews
The power of the delete key.
— Buffy Andrews
Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.
— Common, One Day It'll All Make Sense
Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry.
— Molly Cochran
To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it.
— Michael Kelahan, The World's Greatest Love Letters
Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life.
— Dennis R. Miller
Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus)
— Martijn Benders
It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.
— Thomas MacDonagh
Never take yourself too seriously. Learn to let go and let the words flow.
— Caron Kamps Widden, Restoration
Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
— Deana J. Driver
If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.
— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
Definition of a Writer: One who tells stories that demand to be told.
— Ana Patrick
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
— Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.
— John Hughes
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.
— Sheila Heti
You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
— G.K. Chesterton
Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.
— H. Raven Rose
There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.
— John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
— Robert Hass
Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So she did what many a researcher both great and insignificant does when they are stuck. She yawned while contemplating how to catch the Muse by surprising Her. Almost invariably, the Muse has seen it all before - and also yawns.
— Mavis Cheek
A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.
— K. Sean Harris
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.
— John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?
— T.C. Boyle, When the Killing's Done
Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.
— Jyoti Arora
I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that’s why I like flash fiction, it’s a lot like using a shotgun.
— Neil Leckman
I no longer fear battles and storms that come in the path but afraid of losing someone that is dear to my heart, to whom without winning battles and passing through storms means nothing to me.
— Irfa Rahat
Customer Service' is a random collection of words used to fill a void
— Paul W. Feenstra
Gradually, I am realizing who I'm.
— Irfa Rahat
Mr. B used to take the Denver Post and clip coupons in his sunny dining room till he said he 'got fed up with having to pay for it.' Now, he clips coupons from the library’s newspaper copy. The man’s circumspect ways have, of course, kept him situated in his own home throughout the aging process, which he likes.
— Lynn Byk quoting Mister B.
Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.
— Willie Nelson
Great man loves future and live in present as gift. Foolish one always stare and stuck on the past.
— Bang Roy
The best kind of love is one that brings out the best in you and doesn’t try to make you be someone other than yourself
— Karon Waddell
Knowledge is more than power, it is freedom.
— Steven Cuoco
If you want something different out of life, you have to be prepared to try something new.
— Karon Waddell
The goal in life is not to try and live forever, but to create something that will forever in people’s hearts.
— Karon Waddell
To know what you want, you need to know yourself.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Choosing your flirtations consciously shows emotional maturity.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
I receive the blessing of past dates, the lessons and the joy, and let the rest go now for all time.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Nonconformity in dating is all about being authentic and true to yourself.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
It is important to live authentically who you are, to show yourself to your date as the bond between you builds.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Seeing and feeling your intentions are the precursors of living them in the world of magnetic attraction.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
The secret to consciously dating is letting your heart be your guide.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
When dating, emotionally reveal yourself in increments that are congruent with your comfort level.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Remember, you are powerful and you can always reclaim your space.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
First dates are great ways to see how someone acts when putting his best foot forward.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
As you open to love, you can begin the process of defining your intentions for your dating life.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Spiritual dating requires you both to have the ability to stay present in the moment and expand together.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
The spirit of fun keeps your dating life interesting and not boring.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Spiritual dating is a way to date and enjoy yourself that is emotionally safer, gentler, and infinitely more pleasurable than regular dating.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Spiritual dating is the emotionally healthy way of dating as a conscious, empowered woman.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Spiritual dating is your ticket to a happy, fulfilling love life.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
You deserve to be unleashed. Bliss is your birthright.
— Amy Leigh Mercree
Being a writer means you get to live vicariously through your characters
— Lisa Marbly-Warir
New media is the modern day gold rush.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Self acceptance is pure power.
— Amy Leigh Mercree
Each relationship is an elaborate and complex dance of energetic exchange.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
Spiritual dating is about listening to your instincts and not rushing into anything.
— Amy Leigh Mercree
Dating from the place of internal emotional safety tells your being that you will care for it well.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates