c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If the voices in your head make you cry, you're a lunatic. Put their words on paper, and you're a writer.
— D. VonThaer
The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.
— James  Jones
But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.
— Gloria Whelan
Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful. 
— Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
— Gustave Flaubert
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
— Ezra Pound
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
— Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.
— Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit
I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.
— Terry McMillan
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. 
— V.S. Pritchett
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 
— James Richardson
I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.
— Rukhsana Khan
You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?
— Lynda Barry
Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. 
— Christian Bauman
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.
— Stephen King
For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.
— James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling
My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.
— P.G. Wodehouse
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love
— Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel -- can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top -- doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor.
— Robert Fanney
Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.
— Aryn Kyle
I spent a long time writing in obscurity. You'll spend a long time writing in obscurity. 
— Dan Kennedy
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
— Salman Rushdie
There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.]
— William Faulkner
It's a finger snapping kind of day.
— Coco J. Ginger
My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.
— George Gordon Byron, Don Juan
1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be wary of preaching7. Be prepared for serendipity
— Jane Yolen
A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.
— Sydney Smith, The Edinburgh Review, Or Critical Journal
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
— Roberto Bolaño
Strength is taking charge of your own destiny and not waiting on others to do so. You don’t have to swear and drink and beat people up and slay monsters. You’re allowed to cry and take care of children and cook and get your heart broken and dress up and date and get pregnant. But when decisions have to be made, a strong character makes them and doesn’t wait for someone else.
— Mur Lafferty
Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.
— Anne Rice
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
— John Irving
Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.
— Chinua Achebe.
You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
— Meagan Spooner
...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.
— Angelica Banks
Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!
— Joanne McClean
To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make
— Antony Beevor
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.
— Jerry Stahl
You can only write what you know if you've lived, otherwise, you'll just be writing words.
— Joseph Hunt
You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit.
— Dave Eggers
I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.
— Pat Pattison
Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.
— Shandy L. Kurth
Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out
— Charles Bukowski
I don't write stories, I write characters.
— Bhavya Kaushik
This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.
— Don Roff
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
— George Orwell, Why I Write
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
— Lorrie Moore
Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:The history of how you felt.
— Simon Van Booy
I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
— Stephen King
I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
— Marvin Harris
And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.
— Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season
Listen to your inner self, it knows you best.
— C. Elizabeth
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
I write to believe in goodness.
— Red Haircrow
But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.
— Patrick Rothfuss
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
— Ernest Hemingway
It's the writing that teaches you.
— Isaac Asimov
I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The Sea
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.
— Markus Zusak
Love hurts.Think back over romance novels you’ve loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.So don’t just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don’t satisfy your hero’s desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It’s no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we’ll find a way out of the dark.Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight.
— Damon Suede
Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.
— Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing
And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.
— Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Rejection isn't a sign of failure. Rejection is a reminder that there's always room for improvement.
— Ana Hart
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.
— bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!
— C.K. Webb
Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
— Louis L’Amour
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
— William Faulkner
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.
— Christina Westover
I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.
— Silas House
Writing is both an act of power and surrender. Passion and discovery. It is a tug at your soul that continues to pull you forward, even as you go kicking and screaming.” (p.18)
— Laraine Herring, Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
— T.S. Eliot
Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
— James Lee Burke
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
— Thomas Hardy
A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.
— Janet Fitch
It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
— Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote
Sometimes the things in our heads are far worse than anything they could put in books or on film!!
— C.K. Webb
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences
— Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion
God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? (“Disappearing Act”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
I earn the magic of words by writing.I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I write to reach eternity
— James  Jones
I don't write for a living. I live to write.
— Marwa Ayad
Remember to have a little faith. When you die, I believe, God isn't going to ask you what you published. God's going to ask you what you wrote.
— T.M. McNally
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
— Francis Bacon
Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable. 
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
— Susan Sontag
Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"?The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?)
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.
— Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
— Marianne Moore
When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.
— Charles Baxter
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.
— Robert   Harris, The Ghost
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
— Paul Valéry
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it. 
— George Bernard Shaw
Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.
— Peter Brooks
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRODI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
But I think Cybil was my biggest fan. She cut out my articles and hung them in her locker and we were always cracking up how if you wrote the simplest, most obvious thing in the world people thought you were a genius.
— Blake Nelson, Girl
It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
— Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.
— Alfred Kazin
Inside" ChildrenInside each of us are the children we were at each developmental stage. With regard to our creative dreams, these inside children can prevent us from living them by "acting out" in order to try to get our attention. Your inner 5-year-old is not going to patiently wait as you learn intricate metalworking techniques or study impressionist painting. Yet, your inner 10-year-old may be perfectly suited to learn and observe new skills.What's really needed is parenting of these inside children so that we bring them to age-appropriate activities.
— S.A.R.K.
I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.
— Sue Grafton
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
— William Hazlitt
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
— Sue Monk Kidd
Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.
— Wendy Swore
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
And you are?”She fluttered her hand over her face andbrushed a wisp of light brown hair from her brow.The governor calls me Kitty. It’d probably be best if you did, too.”What an alluring name? It makes me think of a cat with its lips covered by a luscious coat of cream.”Jack stared at Kitty’s mouth, and his tongue tingled at the idea of tasting her rich, flavorful lust.She giggled and wove her hand through the crook in his arm. The soft swell of her breast bumped against his arm. “Oh, you’re naughty, but I love the alluring image.”Then, I hope you’ll let me have a taste later.”He didn’t crowd her but allowed her to step back.She led him across the entranceway to a door on the other side.Remember she’s a princess.
— Anita Philmar
(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had 'phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed to dream of her brokenly.
— William Faulkner, Soldiers' Pay
All writing is filth
— Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.'Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of books. Writing a book is like loving someone. It can be very painful.
— Joël Dicker, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
— H.L. Mencken
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
— William Zinsser
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
— Gustave Flaubert
The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
— David Hare
Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile
— Lytton Strachey
When you do your research write down whatever interests you. Whatever stimulates your imagination. Whatever seems important. A story is built like a stone wall. Not all the stones will fit. Some will have to be discarded. Some broken and reshaped. When you finish the wall it may not look exactly like the wall you envisioned, but it will keep the livestock in and the predators out. (pg. 144)
— Roland Smith, Peak
The StadiumHave you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators.At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.
— Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow
...what makes a story unique is not necessarily the information in the story but what the writer chooses to put in or leave out.(pg. 146-147)
— Roland Smith, Peak
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
— Annie Dillard
I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.
— Horace Greeley
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
— Gustave Flaubert, November
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
— Joyce Carol Oates
The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him
— Thomas Ligotti
Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.
— T.K. Naliaka
Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
— Mark Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.
— Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
THE POLITICIANIf it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!CATHERINEEspecially since you can't rob the people anyway.THE POLITICIANSure...How was that?CATHERINEWhat you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.THE POLITICIANThat book should be in every home!
— Preston Sturges
Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow’s-foot seams.Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
— Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.
— Malcolm Lowry
I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.
— Shauna Niequist
As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.
— Quentin Tarantino
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.", May 10, 1886)
— Anton Chekhov
Hold your pen and spare your voice.
— Dorothy Parker
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.", University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]
— Neil Gaiman
There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have enough the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)
— Bernard Malamud
Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.
— J.P. Donleavy
Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure
— Christopher Stocking
Hard writing makes easy reading.
— Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
— Neil Gaiman
Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
I write across several genres. I’m a slut for words. I can’t keep it in my literary pants.
— Fierce Dolan
Writing Vampire Erotica is like writing sex scenes for porcupines.
— Benjamin R.  Smith
There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.
— Alan Watt, The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within
Imagine in vibrant, wonderful detail your heart’s desire—a reality only you can envision, an adventure only you can direct.Then cradle your creation. Caress it. Mold it. Coddle it until it comes to life.And when your precious treasure grows so grand as to steal your breath away, set it free for all the world to experience. For that is how you live your dreams.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Eena, The Curse of Wanyaka Cave
I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.".]
— Henning Mankell
I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
— Gore Vidal
I started writing to make sense of the world that exists inside my heart
— Judy Croome
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves