Paul Kane...

"As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end."

Flannery O'Connor...

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

The Quran...

"Of those who plot,
God is best."

Edgar Allan Poe...

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."

Vladimir Nabokov...

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."

Herman Melville...

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it."

John Updike...

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head."

Richard Russo...

"I have some ideas simmering, but I don't think it's such a bad thing to let them simmer for a while before I put pen to paper."

Jerzy Kosinski...

"I don't fret over lost time-I can always use the situations in a novel."

Judy Delton...

"A writer can no longer put all his eggs in one basket. If you write fiction, try nonfiction. If you can't sell a book, channel it into an article. A poem into a more salable essay. Be flexible. It's a leap to find out you can adjust, modify, diversify. It's exciting to explore a new genre and find out you can do it well. By taking a risk in another direction, you experience growth."

Alan Garner...

"When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent."

Paul Kane...

"As for my style, it's a hard one to pin down for them I suspect because I'm very chameleon-like when it comes to writing. I work in so many different styles depending on what I'm producing - for example the comedy style is totally different to the psychological one."

Neil Simon...

"Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball."

H. L. Mencken...

"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)...

"When you are describing,

A shape, or sound, or tint;

Don't state the matter plainly,

But put it in a hint;

And learn to look at all things,

With a sort of mental squint."

Frances Hodgson Burnett...

"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."

Truman Capote...

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

Julia Ward Howe...

"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness."

Henry David Thoreau...

"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."

Tracy Kidder...

"What I was trying to suggest... was the intrigue that is always hidden in a scene, what a scene doesn't fully show."

Gustave Flaubert...

"The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity."

Somerset Maugham...

"The best style is the style you don't notice."

Karl Kraus...

"My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin."

Anton Chekhov...

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

Robert Southey...

"It is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."

John Ray...

"He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink."

Richard Wright...

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."

John Cheever...

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle."

Logan Pearsall Smith...

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

Charles Peguy...

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

Helen Keller...

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

John Steinbeck...

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

Leonard Bishop...

"Insights and perceptions pass through the mind like fleet fireflies. Lit for an instant, then gone back into the dark. They are precious, irreplaceable. Stop what you are writing and write them into a notebook, onto a napkin, a scrap of paper. ANYWHERE. They are more important than what you are writing now. What you are writing now is there. It is visible, tangible. You will not lose the mood, the flow, the roll."


From "Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction"

Morley Callaghan...

"There is only one trait that marks the writer. She is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and she is born with it."

Jessamyn West...

"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft."

From "Saturday Review," 21 September 1957

Anne Perry...

"You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why."

Nancy Ann Dibble...

"Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with."

William Faulkner...

"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

"Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created - nothing."

Tom Stoppard...

"The hard part is getting to the top of page 1."

Gustave Flaubert...

“It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough actually to father them.”

From a letter to Bouilhet about the dangers of planning a project too thoroughly.

E. L. Doctorow...

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

Ernest Hemingway...

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

Kate Braverman...

"Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating."

Eudora Welty...

"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists."

Joan Cocteau...

"The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality."

Anthony Burgess...

"Literature is all, or mostly, about sex."

Mordecai Richler...

"Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates."

Murial Spark...

"The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story, and he methods are mythological by nature."

From “Loitering With Intent”

Russell Banks...

"Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for."