c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, “Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays
I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
— Wally Lamb, Couldn't Keep it to Myself:  Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution
There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it's because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course. Writers want to be special, because they're so not. They're losers, overgrown kids who've never escaped from being misfits and who have run away into their own imaginations in an attempt to find self-esteem. Why do you think they all star in their own books? Self included.
— Chancery Stone
In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
— Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.
— James M. Cain
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
— Iain Banks
Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.
— Beth Kephart
Rahasiaku produktif menulis? Hanya satu kata: NIAT.
— Primadonna Angela
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. 
— Janet Frame
Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.
— Shannon L. Alder
Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.
— Kenneth Oppel
The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly
—  light would elucidate the most difficult truths
All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.
— Stephanie  Lennox
Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful
— Laura Goode, Sister Mischief
A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.
— Patti Smith
The best writing is rewriting.
— E.B. White
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
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
It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
— Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
— James Russell Lowell
...it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.
— Mark Dintenfass
Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.
— Frank  Smith
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
— Rebecca West
All Poets are mad.
— Robert  Burton
Treat your relationship with your writing as an important one. Seperti hubungan kamu dengan pacar, teman-teman dan keluarga. Temukan komitmen untuk terus berjalan maju, dan tentukan target untuk tulisanmu (secara waktu, juga secara kualitas), lalu terapkan disiplin untuk mencapai deadline.
— Winna Efendi, Draf 1: Taktik Menulis Fiksi Pertamamu
Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.
— Vanessa Wu, Love Has No Limits
It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.
— Michelle Richmond
[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
— P.G. Wodehouse
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
— Jeanette Winterson
I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
— Nadine Gordimer
not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.
— David Gerrold
Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Writing is such an industry now. In many ways, that's a good thing, in that it removes all the muse-like mystique and makes it a plain old job, accessible to everyone. But with industry comes jargon. I was aware that jargon was starting to fill those growing shelves of Writer's Self Help books, not to mention the blogosphere. Wherever I looked, the writing of a script was being reduced to A, B, C plots, Text and Subtext, Three Act Structure and blah, blah, blah. And I'd think, that's not what writing is! Writing's inside your head! It's thinking! It's every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of pictures and voices and sometimes, if you're very, very lucky, insight.
— Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
— Steven Spielberg
...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?
— Lloyd Alexander, The Arkadians
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
— Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936-1941
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
— Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.
— Cheryl B. Klein, Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.
— Charles Frazier
And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.
— James Lee Burke
I write with all my heart
— Ursula K. Le Guin
A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal."-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337
— Candace Bushnell
Most people keep their dreams to themselves, afraid to follow their hearts. Writers make their dreams a reality with each word, each line that flows from their pen.
— C.K. Webb
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
— Robert Hass
I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.
— Pam Houston
You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.
— Thulani Davis, The Maker of Saints
How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'(Amber)'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'(Virgil Daly)
— Christina Westover, Precipice
Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Shut up and write.
— K.A. Laity
In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.
— Gregory Maguire
Only write a story that only you can write. 
— Alysha Speer
Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
— Edna O'Brien
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
— Samuel Johnson
It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected. 
— Elizabeth Clements, Apollo Weeps
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
— Virginia Woolf
Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.
— Holly Lisle
...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.
— Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
— William Howard Taft
Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.
— Shūsaku Endō, The Final Martyrs
Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.De-accession euphemisms.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
— William Safire
My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.
— Raymond Carver
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
— Rebecca Solnit
Writing is the supreme solace.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.
— Roman Payne
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
— Henry David Thoreau
Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
— Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.
— Leon Uris, Mitla Pass
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
— Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.
— 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
Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
— Mignon McLaughlin
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
— Toni Morrison
Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
— Christina Baldwin
As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
— Erica Jong, The New Writer's Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
— Eudora Welty
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
— Eudora Welty
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
I'll use the blood from my spilling heart to write the words that were never able to slip out of my mouth, so you can see how much you've broken me into a perpetual state of melancholy.
— Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."[From the preface.]
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bagombo Snuff Box
I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
— Tanith Lee, The Book of the Damned
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
— Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise
I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.
— Manuel Puig
History never repeats itself, historians do.
— Lee Benson, The Concept Of Jacksonian Democracy: New York As A Test Case
Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!
— Ben Mikaelsen
IntoxicatedWith the madnessI'm in love withMy sadnessBullshit beggars, enchanted kingdomFashion victims through their charcoaled teeth
— Billy Corgan
The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!
— Richard Greenberg
Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.
— A.D. Posey
What is a writer?A writer is a magician who can create a masterpiece With a wave of a pencilA writer has the key to a new worldCapturing readers and taking them on a roller coaster ride away from realityBut a writer can be a commanding tyrantOr a hypnotist stealing mindsWhat is a writer?A writer is a powerful being, an intelligent thinkerAnd an artist creating mind pictures through words.A writer is a keeper of secretsOr like a roomful of words waiting for a bookBut a writer is also a puppet master taking controlWith no strings attachedWhat is a writer?A writer is a true friendUsing words to spread smiles to the worldA writer is…..The voice of the hear
— Carol Archer
I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.
— Felisberto Hernández
You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --
— Charlotte Brontë
I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
— Milan Kundera
...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
— Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.
— Roman Payne, Crepuscule
Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:* Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives.* Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.* Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.* Do not put statements in the negative form.* Verbs has to agree with their subjects.* No sentence fragments.* Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.* Avoid commas, that are not necessary.* If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.* A writer must not shift your point of view.* Eschew dialect, irregardless.* And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.* Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!* Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.* Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens.* Write all adverbial forms correct.* Don't use contractions in formal writing.* Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.* It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.* If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.* Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.* Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.* Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.* Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.* Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.* If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.* Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.* Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.* Always pick on the correct idiom.* "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"* The adverb always follows the verb.* Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.", November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)
— William Safire, Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage
We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.
— E.B. White
I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.
— Patricia C. Wrede
As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.
— Tom Waits
I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.
— Terry Pratchett
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
— Junot Díaz
A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.
— Nelson Algren, Entrapment and Other Writings
I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.
— Laura Anne Gilman
Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.
— Marie Brennan
Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.
— Ben Monopoli, The Painting of Porcupine City
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
There's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting--not least of which the fact the phrase "standard fantasy setting" can be uttered without irony.
— Yahtzee Croshaw
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
— Mark Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
— Amy Hempel
The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.
— Michael P. Naughton
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
— W.H. Auden
Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
— Mark Twain, Roughing It
We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame
—  there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money....
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
— Edna O'Brien, Country Girl
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader
— Ernest Hemingway
Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.
— Mickey Spillane
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sesungguhnya, penulis yang bersemangat jauh lebih menjanjikan daripada penulis yang berbakat.
— Mohammad Fauzil Adhim, Dunia Kata
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
— Tobias Wolff
He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.
— Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide
Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say
— Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.
— Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
— Don DeLillo
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.
— Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind
—  the writing will demand it of you.
I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.
— Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.
— Dashiell Hammett
lots of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.The truth is we all are travellers in the life's eternal journey, to meet for a short while,to care and share but we tend to forget that nothing lasts forever.if only we could cultivate a sense of detachment,life would have been much easier.
— Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon
When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.
— Harlan Ellison, Shatterday
When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
— Bess Streeter Aldrich
Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three....
— Pandora Poikilos, Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped Out
Crazy by definition isKnowing that true sanity isA figment of the educated mind
— Caleb Warta, My Sanity: The Ramblings of a Mad Man
Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I write to be a part of something - a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.
— Ashley Sanders
It's wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you throw the old writing on the floor and stomp on it, remember to celebrate those seeds of genius and be glad that you're still writing.
— Jeanne Voelker
If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
— Lauren B. Davis
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
— E.L. Doctorow
The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
— A.J. Liebling
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
— E.M. Forster
Learn the rules before you break them.
— Steven Taylor Goldsberry, The Writer's Book of Wisdom: 101 Rules for Mastering Your Craft
...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.
— Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
— Anne Tyler
I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.
— Jack M. Bickham
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. 
— Walter Bagehot
All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
— Janet Frame, Janet Frame: An Autobiography
In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
— Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. 
— Julian Barnes
Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
— William Strunk Jr.
Writers are archeologists of themselves.
— Vicki Grove
The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.
— Marsha Norman
Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it’s that private perpetual struggle.Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.
— Steve Almond
How the excitement comes upon me to tell it all! In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation--as it does, indeed, during the chase itself of whales. I can swear it, having done both, and I will tell YOU though other writers may not. My heart is beating fast; I am in pursuit; I want my victory--that you should see and hear and above all feel the reality behind these words. For they are but a mask. Not the mask that conceals, not a mask that I would have you strike through as mere appearance, or, worse, deceitful appearance. Words need not be that kind of mask, but a mask such as the ancient Greek actors wore, a mask that expresses rather than conceals the inner drama.(But do you know me? Una? You have shipped long with me in the boat that is this book. Let me assure you and tell you that I know you, even something of your pain and joy, for you are much like me. The contract of writing and reading requires that we know each other. Did you know that I try on your mask from time to time? I become a reader, too, reading over what I have just written. If I am your shipbuilder and captain, from time to time I am also your comrade. Feel me now, standing beside you, just behind your shoulder?)
— Sena Jeter Naslund
After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind.
— Jane DeLynn