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."

Anne Rice...

"To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself."

Hello QIW fans! This quote marks the 100th post. More, much to follow. Thanks for visiting.

Dorothy L. Sayers...

"Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

From "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club"

Iris Murdoch...

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea."

Julian Barnes...

"Perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author."

From "Flaubert’s Parrot"

Ann Beattie...

"I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality."

Ernest Hemingway...

"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me. "

Paul West...

"You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn't let go."

Edna Ferber...

"The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible."

Theresa Grant...

"By making writing a part of your daily routine--just like brushing your teeth--you'll discipline yourself to work as a writer instead of a hobbyist who only writes when there's some fun to be had."

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez...

"The terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing."

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette...

"The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen."

William Saroyan...

"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators."

C. N. Bovee...

"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world -- they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."

Josephine Damian...

"I think the biggest mistake writers make is that they write what they want to write as opposed to the story that they should write; they're like some ego-driven chef who refuses to even glance at the recipe, they don't follow the basics constructs of storytelling."

Scott Smith...

"Writing for me is just like building a chair, making an artifact. The idea is that you build, create a story and cobble it together. If it stands up, that's good. If it stands up, it's comfortable, it's a good story, a good chair."

Anatole France...

"You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences."

Ernest Hemingway...

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

From an interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958

Arthur Polotnik...

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."

C. J. Cherryh...

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly."

Gene Fowler...

"Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts."

Christopher Hampton...

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs."

William Targ...

"Editors seek out the first novels with the seductiveness of Don Juans; the pleasure of discovery is one of the obvious reasons."

Adlai Stevenson...

"An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff
and then prints the chaff. "

From "You Said a Mouthful," edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

H. G. Wells...

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

Ray Bradbury...

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

Graham Greene...

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

Guy De Maupassant...

"Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing."

E.L. Doctorow...

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Franz Kafka...

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."

Saul Bellow...

"A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life."

Isaac Bashevis Singer...

"When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez...

"Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."

E.B. White...

"Writing is both mask and unveiling."

William Faulkner...

"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."

Norbet Platt...

"The act of putting
pen to paper
encourages pause
for thought, this in
turn makes us think
more deeply about life,
which helps us regain
our equilibrium."

Vita Sackville-West...

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."