Henry James

Henry James set forth the principles on which to create a mystery: “So long as the events are veiled the imagination will run riot and depict all sorts of horrors, but as soon as the veil is lifted, all mystery disappears and with it the sense of terror.”

Kathleen Krull

"Respect the genre you’re writing in. In an effort to put your own stamp on it, don’t ignore the established conventions of that genre – or you’ll alienate your core audience of loyal buyers."

Maxine Kumin

"One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth."

John Gregory Dunne

"Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt. A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct."

Vladimir Nabokov

"That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves."

Norman Mailer

"I’d never dream of not reading reviews. It’s like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window."

John Irving

"I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros – but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the tickbird."

Rhys Alexander

"Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors."

Beverly Lowry

"The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in."

John Updike

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

Harlan Ellison....

"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it."

Angus Wilson....

"All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery - a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't."

P. G. Wodehouse....

"Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."

John Gregory Dunne....

"Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe."

Flannery O'Connor

"I want to write like a child draws."

Gustave Flaubert....

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

J.M. Synge....

"When I was sitting writing 'The Shadow of the Glen' I got more aid than any learning would have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen." (Preface to The Playboy of the Western World)

Winston Churchill.....

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public."

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s first letter to Emily Dickinson asked her what reading she had done. When Dickinson replied that she had only heard bad things about Whitman, critic Higginson replied:

"It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote 'Leaves of Grass,' only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly plough in his first crop."

Grahame Greene....

“When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye — which leaves it frozen.”