"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
"This is the way to get ideas: Never to let adverse circumstances discourage you, but to believe there is a way out of every difficulty, which may be found by earnest thought." - L. Frank Baum
"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
"A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not." - Henry Fielding
"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 passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." - Orson Welles
"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." - Anonymous
"If you can get people to ask the wrong questions; they'll never find the right answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"The devil himself gets in my inkstand." - Nathanial Hawthorne
"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." - P.G. Wodehouse
"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
"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best." - Maugham
"There is no great writing, only great rewriting."- Justice Brandela
"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
"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." Ann Landers
"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Cicero
"If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau
"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
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window." - Rudolph Erich Rascoe
"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The waste basket has evolved for a reason." - Margaret Atwood
"There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"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
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch
"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
"Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
"Writing takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve... and a lot of hard, hard work."
"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage isalso what it takes to sit down and listen."
"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."
"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."
"Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it."
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward."
"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers."
"Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: What more could you ask of life?"
"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators."
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart."
"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."
"Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things."
"Nature...moves the heart, appeals to the mind, and fires the imagination - health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul."
"Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself."
"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."
"A painting is never finished, it simply stops in interesting places."
Some contend, in poetry, that the mind is dangerous and should be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and should be left in.
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.
"A goal is a dream with a deadline."
"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."
"All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them."
"Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. those days are over."
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
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.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
It is easy enough to be pleasant, When life flows by like a song. But the man worth while is the one who can smile, when everything goes dead wrong.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing
It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.