“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”
— Beatrix Potter
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
— Stephen King
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ”
— Joss Whedon
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
— Louis L'Amour
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
— Anton Chekhov
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
— Neil Gaiman
“You can make anything by writing.”
— C. S. Lewis
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
— Frank Herbert
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
— E. L. Doctorow
“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
— Anne Frank
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
— Paulo Coelho
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
— Philip José Farmer
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
— Philip Pullman
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
— W. Somerset Maugham
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
— Anaïs Nin
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
— Aldous Huxley
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind. ”
— Patrick Dennis
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
— Toni Morrison
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”
— Lloyd Alexander
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
— Thomas Mann
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
— Mark Twain
“I write to discover what I know.”
— Flannery O'Connor
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
— George Orwell
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
— Robert Frost
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
— Philip Roth
“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
— Jack Kerouac
“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
— Roald Dahl
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
— Virginia Woolf
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
— Saul Bellow
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
— Albert Camus
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
— Douglas Adams
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
— Madeleine L'Engle
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
— William Faulkner
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
— Howard Nemerov
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”
— Tim O'Brien
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
— Steve Almond
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”
— Steven Wright
“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
— William S. Burroughs
“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
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