"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." Henry David Thoreau
"Writing is an adventure." Winston Churchill
"Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them." Allan Gurganus
"... only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things." Anton Chekhov
"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening." James Dickey
"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Robert Benchley
"You ask for the distinction between the terms "Editor" and "Publisher": an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors." M. Lincoln Schuster
"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes." William Sansom
"I don't like to write, but I love to have written." Michael Kanin
"However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once." Jean Jacques Rousseau
"You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country." Robert Frost
"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." Cyril Connolly
"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." Peter de Vries
"A writer is working when he's staring out of the window." Burton Rascoe
"The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention." Ezra Pound
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." Elmore Leonard
"Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped." Lillian Helman
"I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none." Robert Frost
"Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of them…Avoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation." Jacques Barzun
"You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." Ray Bradbury
"What a writer brings to any story is an attitude…" John Gregory Dunne
"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." E.L. Doctorow
"The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly…Once you've got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three - throw them away and look for others." Bernard Malamud
"Write in recollection and amazement for yourself." Jack Kerouac
"If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison
"To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later." Brander Matthews
"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style." Sydney Smith
"…your reader is at least as bright as you are." William Maxwell
"…you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists." F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Whether or not you write well, write bravely." Bill Stout
"The writer's duty is to keep on writing…" William Styron
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." D.H. Lawrence
"Caress the detail, the divine detail." Vladimir Nabokov
"Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better."
"The first draft of anything is sh*t." Ernest Hemingway
"Use the right word and not its second cousin." Mark Twain
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