c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work.Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book.
— Bernard Schaffer, Whitechapel: The Final Stand Of Sherlock Holmes
That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? 
— Ariel Gore
End with an image and don't explain.
— Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
— Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
— Abraham Lincoln, Speeches And Letters Of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 1865
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.
— Anne Lamott
If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.
— Shannon L. Alder
Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.
— Warren Ellis
God pity the poor novelist.
— Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
— Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time
In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
— Rose Tremain
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]
— Anna Quindlen
Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.
— Brian Keene
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
— John Steinbeck
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
— William Styron
My pen shall heal, not hurt.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
— Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
— Joyce Carol Oates
You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.
— Jennifer Echols, Love Story
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
— Mel Brooks
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. 
— Ray Bradbury
If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, 'Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote no comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make it hissed Evangeline comma quote I would not marry you if you were the last person on earth period close quotes Quote well comma I'm not so the point does not arise comma close quotes replied Sir Jasper twirling his moustache cynically period And so the long day wore on period End of chapter.'If I had to do that sort of thing I should be feeling all the time that the girl was saying to herself as she took it down, 'Well comma this beats me period How comma with homes for the feebleminded touting for custom on every side comma has a man like this succeeded in remaining at large mark of interrogation.
— P.G. Wodehouse
She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.
— Sándor Márai, Embers
When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.
— Betsy Byars, The Moon and I
When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.
— Orson Scott Card
Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.
— Jennifer Murgia
We write by the light of every story we have ever read. 
— Richard Peck
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
— Nikki Giovanni
Write to your fear.
— Dorothy Allison
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
— Ernest Hemingway
Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.
— Gabrielle Tozer
Writing is the geometry of the soul. 
— Plato
You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.")
— Michael Connelly
If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.
— R.A. Salvatore
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
— Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
— Gustave Flaubert
I am the perfect version of me.
— Besa Kosova
I never met a word I didn't love
— Gail Carson Levine
All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
— Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat
Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. 
— Tara Bray Smith
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.
— Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
— Stephen Sondheim
A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?
— George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
Iniisip ni Lucas kung gaano kalaki ang kapangyarihan ng isang writer. Sa pamamagitan ng mga salita ay kaya niyang patigilin ang dyip, ilabas ang lihim ng mga pasahero, pabuhusin ang ulan upang linisin ang mga basura sa palibot, ikulong ang mga opisyal na corrupt at tuluyang i-delete sa bansa ang kahirapan.
— Ricky Lee, Para Kay B
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
— Archibald MacLeish
...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.
— Jennifer Donnelly
...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
— Connie Willis
To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.
— Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
— Margaret Atwood
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.
— Seamus Heaney, Station Island
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them.
— Tahereh Mafi
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.
— Zadie Smith
He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.
— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. 
— Jennifer Salaiz
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
— Susan Sontag
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.
— E.L. Doctorow
Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.
— Lori Lansens, The Girls
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
— Norman Mailer
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
— John Osborne
Menulis kembali kenangan masa lalu butuh sebuah keberanian.
— Iwan Setyawan, 9 Summers 10 Autumns
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there.
— Jef Mallett
I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.
— Besa Kosova
It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world. 
— Haruki Murakami
Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.
— Drew Goodman
Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.
— J.R. Ward, The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider's Guide
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
— Anne Lamott
I felt like poisoning a monk.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
— David Foster Wallace
When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it -- if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure.
— Warren Ellis
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 
— Jack Kerouac
it's good for you to write down your thoughts. It'stherapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think aboutlife.
— Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken
You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.
— Sandra Brown
Menjadi penulis adalah sebuah perjalanan panjang, yang tidak selalu diisi oleh hal-hal yang menyenangkan. Akan selalu ada kritik, akan selalu ada komentar negatif, akan selalu ada kesalahan. Yang terpenting adalah kita belajar dari kesalahan-kesalahan tersebut dan bangkit untuk menggapai mimpi kita.
— Winna Efendi, Draf 1: Taktik Menulis Fiksi Pertamamu
Never start with a clear idea of storyline. Instead, commence blindly, with a vague notion of trying to include a reference to your favourite band, gift shop, or chocolate bar.
— Alan C. Martin
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
— Nadine Gordimer
Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.
— Lemony Snicket
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
— François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion
The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command....I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
— Joanna Russ
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
— Dashiell Hammett
It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead
— Gustave Flaubert, November
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
— H.L. Mencken
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
— Jacques Barzun
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
— Russell Baker
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.
— Neil Gaiman
You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?" I said. To myself.
— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light
Margaret: Can I - can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President's name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?Margaret: Yeah! Or... do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.Leo: I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?Margaret: It was just for fun.
— Aaron Sorkin
Inspirations never go in for long engagements
—  they demand immediate marriage to action.
It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.
— Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories
I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.
— Barack Obama
Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman. 
— Frank Miller, Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
— Terry Pratchett
not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
— Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. And then the most important thing, once you get any level of quality--get to the point where you wanna write, and you can write--is tell YOUR story. Don't tell a story anyone else can tell. Because you always start out with other people's voices... There will always be people who are better or smarter than you. There are people who are better writers than me, who plot better than I do, but there is no one who can tell a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
— Neil Gaiman
Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I writeNotFor the sake of gloryNot For the sake of fameNotFor the sake of successBut for the sake of my soul
— Beth Nimmo, Rachel's Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
— E.L. Doctorow
I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.
— Elizabeth Reyes
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
— Ezra Pound
Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.
— Cornelia Funke
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
— Ernest Hemingway
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.
— Y.S. Lee
We do not write because we want to
—  we write because we have to.
But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")
— Neil Gaiman
A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.
— H.P. Lovecraft
If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.I send you...A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.
— S.A.R.K.
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.
— Grace Paley
We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.
— Junot Díaz
I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again... 
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
— Neil Gaiman
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race
— Henry Miller
Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.
— Charlotte Brontë
Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.
— Timothy Egan
Dalam mengarang saya tidak pernah tergesa-gesa. Saya anggap pekerjaan mengarang adalah tugas yang santai, yang harus dikerjakan dengan senang hati. Kalau saya menulisnya dengan terburu-buru, berarti dengan hati yang kesal, maka dapat dipastikan bahwa si pembaca pun akan merasakannya.
— Nh. Dini, Proses Kreatif: Mengapa dan Bagaimana Saya Mengarang
Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others. 
— S.A.R.K.
I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?
— Melissa Keil, Life in Outer Space
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
— Baltasar Gracián
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
— Elie Wiesel
A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.
— Alice Steinbach, Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman
Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
— Jyrki Vainonen
I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. 
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You can cover a great deal of country in books. 
— Andrew Lang
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
— Neil Gaiman
When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
— Stephen King
Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
— Patricia Fuller
A Gift for YouI send you...A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond. You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. 
— S.A.R.K., Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day
If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you.
— Alma Alexander
The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.
— E.B. White, The Elements of Style
If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.
— Jane Espenson
My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.
— Natalie Goldberg
...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.
— Alasdair Gray
I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.
— Richard Bausch
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962
— John Steinbeck
Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting.
— Robin D. Laws
I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothloriene no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horselords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fanghorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystefied as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22.J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955
— J.R.R. Tolkien
And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza.
— Nicholas Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman
He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.
— Jonathan Franzen
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.
— Patrick Rothfuss
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
The pen is mightier than the sword!
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The joy of writing.The power of preserving.Revenge of a mortal hand.
— Wisława Szymborska
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
— Gwendolyn Brooks
I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.
— T.C. Boyle
Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. 
— Charles Willeford
Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
— Natalie Goldberg
if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready. 
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
A book comes and says, 'Write me.
— Madeleine L'Engle
But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.", 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
— T.C. Boyle
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
— Tennessee Williams
[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.
— Richard Peck
Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin.
— Victor Kiam
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
— Stephen King
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
— Lawrence Clark Powell
Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.
— Red Haircrow
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
— Barbara Kingsolver