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."