"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainty that just to be alive is a grand thing." - Agatha Christie

"If one wants to write, one simply has to organize one's life in a
mass of little habits." - Graham Greene

"Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be
harvested." -Guinean saying

"Not a single word or idea is too good to be deleted, changed, or
improved." -Abby Goldsmith

"I sit at a desk. I face the wall. If you sit facing the wall, the
only way out is through the sentences." - E. L. Doctorow

"When we are writing, painting or composing, we are, during the time
of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a
wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer and people more
wondrously complex than we normally realize." - Madeleine L'Engle

"Any man who will look into his heart and honestly write what he sees
there will find plenty of readers." Edgar W. House.

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there." Thomas Berger.

"I collect lines and snippets of things somebody might say - things I
overhear, things I see in the newspaper, things I think up, dream up,
wake up with in the middle of the night. I write a line down in my
notebook. If I can get enough of those things, then characters begin
to emerge." - Richard Ford

"I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that.
There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply. You
don't use words that are not going to be employed in the narrative or
context. It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each
of which is a whole scene in itself. By that, you put the reader right
in there where the story is." -Theodore Sturgeon

"I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my
life more interesting than it was." --Diane Wakoski

"A 19th century Irish immigrant named O'Reilly called the newspaper 'a
biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a
day. It is a photograph, of 24 hours' length, of the mysterious river
of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's
newspapers -- which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and
joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue,
than the greatest book ever written -- and we use them to light the
fire.'" --Adair Lara

"The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says
something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly
always more profitable) to become a real estate agent." --Maria
Lenhart

"The kind of imagination I use in writing, when I try to lose control
of consciousness, works very much like dreams. The subconscious takes
over and it's fun... I do feel if ever I was looking for a source of
material, all I would have to do is go back to my dreams." - Amy Tan

"I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe
a story is only valid when it is immediate and passionate; when it
dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you
destroy it." - Ray Bradbury

"When I'm stuck, I imagine my best friend in a tough situation.
'You've got to help me,' my friend (character) says. 'I can't get out
of this without you.' 'Sorry, I'm just not in the mood,' is not an
option. 'I'd rather scrub the kitchen floor,' is not an option. I have
to help my friend. I probe, ask questions. How did you get where you
are? Where would you like to be? What tools do you have to help you?"
- Camille Minichino

"I'm an optimistic writer. I don't want to ignore the ills of the
world; I want to offer workable alternatives to those ills. I want to
remind people of the wonders that do exist, and those that might. "-
Charles de Lint

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented
individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work." - Stephen
King

"Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique
alone is just an embroidered pot holder." - Raymond Chandler

"Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter." - Ray Bradbury

"A garden in the early stage is not a pleasant or compelling place:
it's a lot of arduous, messy, noisome work -- digging up the hard
ground, putting in the fertilizer, along with the seeds and seedlings.
So with beginning a story or novel." -Ted Solotaroff

"Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." -
Leonard Cohen

"What's ahead of me and what's behind me are nothing compared to
what's inside me." - Jean Shapiro

"The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -
Albert Einstein

"Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the
complicated simple." - Charlie Mingus

"Every person you meet - and everything you do in life - is an
opportunity to learn something. That's important to all of us, but
most of all to a writer because a writer can use anything." Tom Clancy

"A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue
without being too baffling or too obvious." Walker Percy

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
- Benjamin Franklin

"It is the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the
time." - Tallulah Bankhead

"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself.. ALOUD" -CoCo Chanel

"It takes time, trust, and courage for the pattern of a story of
emerge in perfect (or imperfect) symmetry. Trust is the most important
because a writer must let it happen and believe that, in time, in
will." - Pamela Jane

"If I have ten minutes I use them even if they bring only two lines,
and it keeps the book alive." - Rumer Godden.

"In prose the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to
them...when you think of something abstract you are more inclined to
use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to
prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job
for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and
get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.
Afterwards one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that
will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what
impression one's words are likely to make on another person." - George
Orwell

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is
the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." - Mark Twain

"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought
on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes

"Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a
dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of
one who knows how to combine them." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"All the fun's in how you say a thing." - Robert Frost.

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." - Stephen King

"I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants
reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of
the world's greatest rewriters." - James A. Michener.

"In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word
you have written, you have no idea what vigour it will give your
style." - Sydney Smith

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for
writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too
famous." - Robert Charles Benchley

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for
a few close friends, and then for money." - Moliere

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Eliot

"The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that...
women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves." -
Louis Otto-Peters

"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The waste
basket has evolved for a reason." - Margaret Atwood

"I get a warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty
much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it,
writing is hell." - William Stryon

"There's no magic formula. To become a competent writer, you write
until you start to sound like you, and then you keep on writing.
Finish things you start. Get better." - Neil Gaiman

"Real life doesn't have to make sense. Fiction does." - Janeen O'Kerry

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius
will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination
alone are omnipotent." - Calvin Coolidge

"Writing takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve... and a lot
of hard, hard work."- Georgia 0' Keefe

"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream
while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the
right to dream."- Gaston Bachelard

"The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a
road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him
with something of wild, creative delight." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he
whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith

"A painting is never finished, it simply stops in interesting
places."- Paul Gardner

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the
outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst
enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath

"A goal is a dream with a deadline." - Leo B. Helzel

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."- Amelia Earhart

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get
to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. -
Sharon O'Brien

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.-
Jack London

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." - Eden Phillpotts
"What's ahead of me and what's behind me are nothing compared to what's inside me." - Jean Shapiro