c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.
— M. Kirin
Writing is an adventure. There is no way to know where it will take you, and what you will find. You could find success. You could find fans. Or, best of all, you could find yourself.
— M. Kirin
No man can stay for forever young, Unless he is a writer.
— Alamvusha
Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn’t work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.Sit down, and write.
— M. Kirin
All great writers share one thing in common:They finished their books.
— M. Kirin
Originality is not writing the story that has never been told, but writing the stories only you can tell.
— M. Kirin
I write because sometimes I feel I cannot breathe...until I do.
— Karris Callahan
If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.
— M. Kirin
The only way to overcome fear and doubt is to go against them.
— M. Kirin
Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is beyond our reach. The best time to write is now, in the present.
— M. Kirin
Every writer in the history of the world has been afraid to put words on the page. But we only remember those who overcame that fear.
— M. Kirin
If you were waiting for a sign that you’re meant to be a writer…THIS IS IT.
— M. Kirin
You were meant to write this book.
— M. Kirin
You’re writing someone’s ‘future’ favorite book.
— M. Kirin
If you wish to be a writer– then write, and don’t allow anyone to tell you that you’re on the ‘wrong’ path. You know where you’re going, and each word you write gets you a step closer.
— M. Kirin
Write the words "The FIve Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
No man can stay forever young unless he is a writer.
— Alamvusha
Let you light shine from the inside out.
— Juliet M. Sampson
An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.
— Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writer who tend to be shy, get to stay at home and still be public.
— Anne Lamott
To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don’t simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don’t know.
— M.J. Rose, Seduction
search and read my blog at pankajsundali.blogspot.in
— Pankaj Sundali
Most people put off my mother's erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just explained everything. To me that was just an excuse. I mean, brain surgeons can be crazy too, but no one says that's all right. Fortunately for my mother, I am alone in this opinion.
— Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
I am an acquired taste. Do with that what you will.
— Lisa Marie Perry
The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.
— Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke
He who has experienced the mystery of the nature is full of life, full of love, full of joy. Radiance emanates from the whole existence itself, it does not know the meaning of holding back. It is pure giving-giving of love. For the great writers, love is like holding ice in hand, it just turns to water and they lose out their role but for a mystic the moment ice transforms to water love starts to flow.
— Maitreya Rudrabhayananda, Drop It! Practical Guide to Self Enlightenment
I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.
— Kevin James Breaux
The people who don't give you a standing ovation for the hurdles you cross are just afraid that you might win the race. They do not cheer you but they sit, lurking on the sidelines, biting their fingernails hoping you will stumble before the end. They secretly wish you will never win this race. But watch out for them, they will be the firstto stand and cheer you when you stand on that podium of success.
— Crystal Evans, Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis
A lady sent me an email recently advising me to change my environment. I guess she read through the lines of my writing and I had adequately painted a portrait of my experiences for her to form a conclusion that melancholia and fatalistic views of my protagonist reveals the depth or layers of my own consciousness. I haven't experienced much of life at twenty five but I've noticed enough, more than most people do at my age. I won't lie that sometimes it leaves me menacingly depressed. I only represent myself. I am in no competition with anyone. I often muse that if people were half concerned about wars and crimes, corruption in high places and poverty with the heavy regard they place upon other's lives then we would have a better world. Just imagine if the average man on the road heckled politicians the way they are often inclined to insult a fat woman. I have a Ton load of bad experiences but I have not allowed them to deter me, people will think about them at some high point in my life and try to use it to besmirch whatever glory I may attain. I understand that too, they can use it for whatever barometer on their lives they see fit but as for me, I used my crash falls as stairwells to greatness. Sometimes I feel alone because I am youthful and curious about life and people judge me for it and oftentimes it leaves me feeling lonely and asocial. You see the deep thinker has to be careful, the shallow minded will take one look and paint him as madness.
— Crystal Evans
With our writings, we can right the world.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
— Steve Allen
A good editor can make a respectable writer remarkable, just like a good parent helps a child become amazing.
— Justin Alcala
You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness.
— Katelyn S. Bolds
Inspiration doesn't always come in chronological order.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney
It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.
— Angela Carter
The righteous will possess the earth, and they will live forever on it." PSALM 37:29. ~Stop being envious no one can make it without the true help of a honest individual or someone who believes in your future. Stop hating people for success this will make your bones rotten. DONT burn the only bride you left standing. Your image doe's not pay bills stop being concerned about how your social media page looks. & build a foundation on the heels of your strength. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves the world is to cold for anyone to be in weakness. #God1st #FAMILYCLOSE #Author #Writer #MusicArtist
— Ray Rage Patino
To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!
— Susan Lendroth
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
— Ernest Hemingway
He can see what move I'm planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.
— Sangu Mandanna, The Lost Girl
Because there are a million thoughts that never sleepand a million more that wake up as each second passes by...And it's insanity insidebut I can no longer keep quietOh, I can't speak as wellI need to writeI have to write...
— Sanhita Baruah
Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.
— Sara Sheridan
Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.
— Sara Sheridan
In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.
— Sara Sheridan
For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.
— Sara Sheridan
I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
— Sara Sheridan
It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.
— Sara Sheridan
I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.
— Sara Sheridan
A microphone is to a comic, what a pen is to a writer. There's power in it.
— Pamelar Hickinson
The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.
— Sara Sheridan
I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
— Sara Sheridan
When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.
— Sara Sheridan, Secret of the Sands
Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.
— Sara Sheridan
Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in prestigiouslaw firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may bestill sweating out his first novel.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal tobelieve what all sensible people know is true); childishness (anapparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondnessfor daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of properrespect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for cryingover nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixationor both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness andneatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usualfeature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strangeadmixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelingsfor or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak ofcunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurableaddiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
When you are young and strong...you can stay alive on your hatred"....but realized later "They can take everything from me except my mind and heart"Nelson Mandela from Long Walk to Freedom
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.
— Clarence Darrow
The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.
— Lloyd Alexander
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.
— Sara Sheridan
We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?
— Gian-Carlo Rota
From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
— George Orwell
Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.
— Sara Sheridan
A writer's job is done once the lines touch reader's forbidden chords.
— Shreya Gupta
The greatest tribute one can give to a writer is that it is simply enough to read him.
— Isaac Goldberg
Here are the Ten Commandments for a writer: Create, Create, Create, Create, Create, Create...
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.
— Sara Sheridan
Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.
— Thomm Quackenbush
People who label erotica writers as sluts/men-whores remind me of the mob that once condemned smart women as witches. Mankind has not evolved much.
— Anna Bayes
The first task of every author is to evoke emotion in their reader. You may laugh or you may cry; you may love me or you may hate me. So long as you feel something, I know that I'm doing my job.
— V.L. Dreyer
My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write. 
— Charlotte Eriksson
Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
What I really want is to be recognized as a writer; that someday, my poetry — this is an interesting paradox — would be taught in English classes; for my name, along with my poetry, to exist 500 years from now.
— Harley King
Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.
— Ace Antonio Hall
I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Writers get to construct a magical world that readers can visit in thought and extend their stay with imagination.
— Sandra Alex
I write because if I don’t let it out of my system, I will die with guilt.
— Shahla Khan, I Want Back My Sparkle!: Breaking the Global Chains of Gender Slavery.
Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.
— Kristine Kathryn Rusch
I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.
— Julia Child, My Life in France
A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader … as an irritating voice is to a listener.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Why I write music? Because it hurts not to.
— Charlotte Eriksson
On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?
— David Morrell, The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing
I’ve long considered becoming a writer to be the death of nightmares. For me at least, since I started writing I hadn’t had any. Something really terrible or awful happens in a dream and you wake up and think, awesome, and reach for a pen and paper.
— Logan Kain, The Dead Will Rise First
You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice.
— John Irving, In One Person
There is no vacation for a writer! Every moment of his life is work!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Words both written and read are my passion.
— Leslie Austin, A Fox Called Woff
There is a reason why I am a writer... sometimes it is the only way you can get people to listen to you!
— Phil Wohl
The best kind of day is a writing day
— Buffy Andrews
A good writer must be like the birds of a dark forest; you can’t see them, but you can hear their mysterious and wise voices!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
— George Orwell, Why I Write
I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
I never said you were supposed to be a jailer, i only said a normal person would have questioned why someone would create a decoy nun and then crawl out the window.
— Janette Rallison, Just One Wish
You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.
— Don Roff
The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
A writer is the one who loves to write . . . on and about anything . . . And this clears that I am a writer!!
— Anamika Mishra
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.
— William Saroyan, The William Saroyan Reader
Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.
— Patti Digh, Creative Is a Verb: If You're Alive, You're Creative
I write because I have to
—  because I wouldn't know what to do with my hands if I didn't.
The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.
— D.A. Botta
But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, ‘Well, we all made it; why can’t these other poor people make it?’ And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability — of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don’t have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley — the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as being innately of itself indolent. This kind of narrow thinking is a temptation to all sorts of people, and one has to be sympathetic with the people who are wrong, too, you see. It is not enough just to be sympathetic with the people who are belittled; it is necessary to be sympathetic with the people who belittle them. So, in worrying about the persecuted, one is obliged also to worry about the persecutors. I consider that a basic measure of growth.
— William Saroyan
For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
— Michelle M. Pillow
Writer is a miner
—  he works in the gloomy places like a miner to get the precious material.
I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about... only out of time to write it in.
— Rayne Hall
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
— William Saroyan
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.
— David Mitchell
Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to write...so I do.
— Cassandra Giovanni
Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life.
— D.A. Botta
Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.
— Fabrizio de André
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
— D.A. Botta
...each person is required to ask, 'what is my authority?' - on what do you base your decisions? if it's yourself, then you are without excuse...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.
— Isaac Asimov
You have to invest yourself as a reader to be a good writer.
— Saru Singhal
The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
— George Orwell, 1984
The greatest artists express their inner self
—  an artist paints her rage
...what makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you've done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes even happiness. writing is of a specific purpose & states a meaning within what is written.
— Michael Stuckey
The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.
— Marcus Speh, Get Lit, Round 1: Short Fiction
I may not be able to say these words to you but that doesn't mean I can't say it to the rest of the world. I'm not a poet. Nor do I try to be one. I simply share what I do in my spare time. All poetry springs from genuine feelings. I'm only a woman expressing herself to the world.
— Tammy-Louise Wilkins, My Intimate Poetry
Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.
— Jennifer V. Clancy
...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say "Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?
— D.A. Botta
Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says "i remember you. I am glad you are here again".
— D.A. Botta
Ideally, love is unconditional; practically, it is more often the opposite.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
I have yet to find that one perfect phrase that epitomizes all the mysteries of the universe. Luckily, I doubt to ever pen it in this lifetime, for then the seeking ends; miserable is the day the adventure ends.
— D.A. Botta
To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.
— D.A. Botta
Sometimes just looking into a person's eyes can tell a graphic story and a brilliant novel if you have the ability to turn it into words.
— L.L. Caulton
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
I wrote. I wrote all the things I couldn’t say to him. I wrote about how much I believed in us. I wrote about how much I trusted God. I wrote that I was praying for him. I wrote down all the jokes I could remember, which weren’t many.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.
— Andre Dubus
You know that you are a writer if you are imaginative. You know that you are a writer if you are curious. You know that you are a writer if you are interested in the things and people of the world. You know that you are a writer if you hold a minie ball in your hand and wonder about its story. You know that you are a writer if you like the sound of rain on the roof. And if you want to tell someone else about your heart and how waiting for the thunder sometimes makes you feel, if you work to find the words to do that, then you are a writer. --Maureen O'Toople in the short story "Your Question for Author Here
— Jon Scieszka, Funny Business
You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.
— David Morrell
...if you've got writer's block, you aren't empty - maybe it's just like Twitter - overwhelmed, and loading seems to be taking a while...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
— Ben Hecht
Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.
— Victor J. Banis
What a writer brought to a book didn't matter as much as what the reader contributed.
— Lisa Morton, Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
— Ernest Hemingway
...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences.
— Sophia Rose, Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
...If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhood—but no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
— Annie Dillard
If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.
— David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.
— Zoe Winters, Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author
Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.
— Thomas   Moore
I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer.
— Tom Conrad
I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.
— Lev Grossman
There is no good or bad author; there is only one kind of an author, that who connects with the readers.
— Saru Singhal
I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!
— Tom Conrad
You can be a member of all of the romance writers associations, take part in all of the networking available, or win the latest romance award... but guess what? None of that makes a difference if you don't WRITE something people want to READ. The greatest editor in the world won't make your book a best seller if it isn't something people care about. So forget all of the fluff that clouds your purpose... writing!!
— Kathryn Le Veque
If you can write
—  then you are a writer - Rayvon L Browne
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.
— Don DeLillo, The Names
Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he leaned in to kiss her, she gave herself over to him. While he held her close, she ran her hands over his shoulders and back, feeling the strength in his arms. She knew he’d wanted more in their relationship than she’d been willing to offer, but here and now, she suddenly knew she had no other choice. There was only this moment, and it was theirs.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
Be quick, but don't hurry.
— John Wooden
Mum used to say we were the same soul split in two and walking around on four legs. It seems unnatural being born together and then dying apart.
— Melodie Ramone, After Forever Ends
You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
There’s something so great about this,” she whispers. About what?” I whisper back.About this,” she whispers. About being outlaws. It’s just you and me—against the world.
— Sonya Sones
I could not have asked for a better friends or a better life, but there’s a nasty trick about living. It happens at its own pace and in its own way and you never, never know what’s coming next. So you keep running and running to keep up with it and most people get tired. Others don’t get tired. They just get overtaken by the road.
— Melodie Ramone, After Forever Ends
She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.
— Emily Maguire
He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year's harvest.
— François Lelord, Hector and the Secrets of Love
It began with a perfect plan. Shape-wise we had a circle, a simple uncomplicated curve to guide us comfortably from one thing to another, an easy predictable ride promising a natural progression from A to B, C and D, and so on until we reached our destination. But somewhere down that smooth line, I think around F, it all went pear-shaped.
— Ivana Hruba, A Decent Ransom: A Story of a Kidnapping Gone Right
And they...LIVED! Life isn't always ‘Happily Ever After’, rather, loving FOREVER, regardless.
— Carmen DeSousa, She Belongs To Me
A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.
— Milan Kundera
I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.
— José Luís Peixoto, The Implacable Order of Things
When you're younger you're so happy to get some good loving you convince yourself you're in love, can't live with out it, and chase the dick like a crack addict after the pipe, or chase the bad sex hoping something happened to the man over night and the next time it'll be good.
— Jill Nelson, Sexual Healing
Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.
— Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro
You know what feels really fucking awesome? Loving someone so much that it's all consuming. Telling that person you love them, even though they refuse to say it back. And then finally hearing them say that they do love you, but to someone else. To someone they have slept with. Someone that isn't you. I want to forget I heard those three words. I want to dissolve the images I have in my heard of her with him. I think I'm going to throw up.
— Steph Campbell, Grounding Quinn
Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?
— Jerome Charyn, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.
— José Luís Peixoto, The Implacable Order of Things
When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.
— Jane Austen
He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.
— Jay McInerney, Brightness Falls
Talking about ideas for a novel is a bit like showing pictures of the ultrasound if you're pregnant. Until they're out in the world, they can only be wonderful to you.
— Clare Boylan
No matter how much restitution she paid with every word and deed, her blood-stained hands could never really be clean, even if no one else knew they were dirty.
— Stacy Hawkins Adams, Lead Me Home
Anne did think on the question with perfect decision, and said as much in replay as her own feelings could accomplish, or as his seemed able to bear, for he was too much affected to renew the subject - and when he spoke again, it was something totally different.
— Jane Austen
History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.
— Aziz Hamza, Eterlimus
The sweet-smelling aroma of the island spices still hung in the air. It filled his nostrils and titillated his appetite all over again. His appetite drove him mad for something much more than food.
— Luke A.M. Brown, The Non-Silence of the Lamb: Contemporary Version
The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.
— Clark Zlotchew, The Caucasian Menace
That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.
— Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman 
— John Fowles
Pfft, aren’t you optimistic,” my mouth twists into an ugly grimace as I clench my fists. My throat dries from the rushed breathing as my vision blurs, tears drying, my blood pounds in my ears. “Thinking as if this shit storm will ever blow over. Everyone’s got their scars and stories. This is yours.”Though I’ll always be haunted, memories always resurface.
— Jocelyn  White, The Ezekiel Experience
The great novels are deterrents. A Merck's manual on how not to live.
— Marty Rubin
Once we were inside the walls of Rahway Prison the mood changed. We were patted down for weapons and given a tour. They showed us how to make improvised weapons that people would hide in their ass. The guards pointed out the young guys who had become someone’s bitch.”Excerpt From: Life of a Bastard Vol. 1 By Damien Black
— Damien     Black, Life of a Bastard
Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.”The Barn, by Ken Cruickshank
— Ken Cruickshank
Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.”The Barn
— Ken Cruickshank
Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.
— Ken Cruickshank
For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'être of the art of the novel.
— Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
Whenever you are transplanted, like me, you will understand how very delightful it is to meet with anything at all like what one has left behind.
— Jane Austen, Emma
The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.
— Fredric Jameson
He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: “This is as amusing as a novel.
— Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language
Was he shiny and bright and something sucked it out of him? Cecilia thought. But stars are a load of fire, maybe his were flamed out, but could they burn out again? After Cecilia drew him and his empty eyes, she wanted to write those words down, it felt like song lyrics. And she did. Making it in bold letters.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the wood stove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.
— Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain
If you were crossing the road and saw a black cat passing, you may possibly get hit by a car, or a mail boy or the sky could rain in summer, possibly snow. Those were theories, none of them were true. It was like karma; it only happens to you if you believed in them. Myths, Cecilia called them. The guy looked frozen. This is silly, she thought. He could not be that affected by the cat. Cecilia had been working here for a year and she wasn’t struck by lightning, she was alive, of course, nobody chose the cat so this is why she was the oldest pet in the store.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
In her past were sweet passages, in her future rosy hopes.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
He did not yet known how many commenced lefe-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first, or at most the second chapter.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley