"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
-Mark Twain

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
-Italo Calvino

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
-Will Rogers

"Pay no attention to what the critics say. There has never been a statue erected to a critic."
-Jean Sibelius

"Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one."
-Alec Guinness

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
-Elmore Leonard

"Humane people who have important things on their mind almost always write well."
-Kurt Vonnegut, letter to Arpad Kadarkay

"The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive."
-Ray Bradbury

"That which does not add to a story takes away from it."
-Herb Trimpe

"I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

"You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do."
-Henry Ford

"No matter what kind of literary reception a writer secretly desires, what may please him most is an unexpected, ornery reader."
-Stanley Crouch

"To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do. "
-Aristotle

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."
-William Styron

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

"I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there."
-Kurt Vonnegut, address to the American Physical Society

"Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system."
-Brian Aldiss

"You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him."
-Flannery O'Connor

"Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy."
-Arthur Evans

"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
-Jim Bishop

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
-Francisco de Goya

"A short story is an illuminated moment of consciousness."
-Anton Chekhov

"I try all things. I achieve what I can."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!"
-Ray Bradbury

"Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep."
-Scott Adams

"Writing is like Prostitution. First, you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money."
-Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière)

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-Aristotle

"Inside every fat book is a thin book trying to get out"
-Unknown

"Writing is simply the writer and the reader on opposite ends of a pencil; they should be as close together as that."
-Jay R. Gould

"At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain-how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant."
-Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

"Character is revealed by action. Action is motivated by character."
-Norton Wright

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
-William Faulkner

"The large words are worn out, when the great occasion comes they do not describe it. Better use the small ones and put into them every ounce of their weight."
-Thomas Mann, "A Man and His Dog"

"You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his immediate needs may draw his own conclusions."
-Ezra Pound

"All art is knowing when to stop."
-Toni Morrison

"The man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the man doing it"
-Chinese Proverb

"Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar."
-Mickey Spillane

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
-Flannery O'Connor

"You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it."
-Rita Mae Brown

"For it is not possible, is it, that language itself is the primary obstacle to communication?"
-Joyce Carole Oates, Exile

"No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind."
-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
-Douglas Adams

"Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations."
-Eudora Welty

"Writing requires devotion and a bit of arrogance."
-Buchi Emecheta

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to."
-Carl Van Doren (1885-1950)

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
-Kingsly Amis

In the first person, anything can be made to sound credible.
-George Orwell

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
-Orson Scott Card

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things you are doomed.
-Ray Bradbury

Writing is the only job I know that your wife will nag you out of.
-Frederik Pohl

Three rules for literary success:
1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot.
3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.
-Robert Silverberg

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
-Ray Bradbury

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing . . . I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
-Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
-Norman Mailer

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
-George Orwell (1903-1950)

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.
-Charles de Lint

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I 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.
-William Faulkner

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world. 
- Tom Clancy

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their
hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
- Jessamyn West


Writing a novel is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights let you, but you can make the whole trip that way.
- E. L. Doctorow

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

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is
boundless. 
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If I waited for perfection . . . I would never write a word. 
- Margaret Atwood

First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life. 
- Hortense Calisher

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about.
-Bernard Malamud

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go
about it except to write it and take my chances.
-John Steinbeck

I try to think of characters who on the surface of their actions are
deeply unsympathetic. It's the writer's job to make them sympathetic, in
spite of themselves.
-John Irving

The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never
giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
-Gabriel Fielding

Don't loaf and invite inspiration. Light after it with a club, and if
you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks
remarkably like it.
-Jack London

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.
-Pete Murphy
 

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer.
-Harlan Ellison

There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something
indefinable which we call the "breaks." In order for a writer to
succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.
-Countee Cullen

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.
-Tennessee Williams

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should
contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for
the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a
machine no unnecessary parts.
-William Strunk, Jr.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick
sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then
gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can
permit myself to contemplate.
-John Steinbeck

Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes
chronic in their sick minds.
-Juvenal

There seems to be no physical handicap or chance of environment that
can hold a real writer down, and there is no luck, no influence, no
money that will keep a writer going when she is written out."
-Kathleen Norris

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the
opposite direction.
-Albert Einstein

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us
wordy evidence of the fact.
-George Eliot

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the
night to write.
-Saul Bellow

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
-George Bernard Shaw

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get
anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.
-Louis L'Amour

If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story.
-Barbara Greene

The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people
without its being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it is
simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for
themselves."
-Stanley Kubrick (via D. Kern)

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me
a genius.
-Michelangelo

Stories tell us of what we already knew and forgot, and remind us of
what we haven’t yet imagined.
-Anne L. Watson

In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose
should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want
them to believe your story.
-Ben Bova

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-Howard Aiken

I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as
they fly by.
-Douglas Adams

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist.
-Robert Browning

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good
writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
-Orson Scott Card

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's
mat is a story.
-John LeCarre

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, the
melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.
-Graham Greene

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and science.
-Albert Einstein

I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with
even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of
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. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes
a baby squall for attention.
-George Orwell

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there
have been no societies that did not tell stories.
-Ursula K. LeGuin

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them
think you were born that way.
-Ernest Hemingway

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the
song still in them.
-Henry David Thoreau

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating
themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
-Willa Cather

It is perfectly okay to write garbage - as long as you edit
brilliantly.
-C. J. Cherryh

There is always a simple solution to every human problem - neat,
plausible, and wrong.
-H. L. Mencken (via Dennis Palumbo)

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not
understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains…why a bird
sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena
engaged my thought throughout my life.
-Leonardo da Vinci

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and
not the other way around.
-George Orwell

A writer doesn't need "an" idea for a book; she needs at least forty.
-Elizabeth Peters

Phantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with
her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.
-Francesco de Goya

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go
away.
-Philip K. Dick

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we pound out tunes fit
to make bears dance, when what we want is to win over the stars.
-Gustave Flaubert