~~~~~

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my de
sk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
Pearl S. Buck

The best way to become more creative is to create nothing.

Ilchi Lee

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate
in their insane breasts.
Juvenal

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie.
Validate what you don t validate. Indulge what you don t like. Wallow in it. Write t
he opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the gr
ain!
Deena Metzger

If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of id

eas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts an
d philosophies.
Allan W. Eckert

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hunter Thompson

Life stand still here.

Virginia Woolf

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the
world at large.
Confucius

If there s a book you really want to read, but it hasn t been written yet, then you
must write it.
Toni Morrison

Half of being smart is knowing what you re dumb at.

David Gerrold

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Walt Whitman

I never quite know when I m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a par
ty and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle o
f a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he s
ick?
No, my wife says, he s writing something.
James Thurber

I love being a writer. What I can t stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

Thinking is common to all.

Heraclitus

If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your editor self, the sel
f that reads. You ve done plenty of reading, you don t need practise right now.
Just write.
Sandra Jensen

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Oscar Wilde

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow
Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Let any clergyman try to preach the T
ruth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his ch
urch on his own bannister.
Herman Melville

When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what his thoughts a
re at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible
, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts o
r sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with th
e expression.
Edgar Allan Poe

Put weather in.

Joseph Hansen

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.

Dante Alighieri

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his gu
ts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles Peguy

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
Sidney Smith

Reading and weeping opens the door to one s heart, but writing and weeping opens t
he window to one s soul.
M. K. Simmons

An artist needn t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a w

arm heart for his fellow men.
Vincent Van Gogh

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
Van Wyck Brooks

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and fa
miliar things new.
Samuel Johnson

The best style is the style you don t notice.

Somerset Maugham

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he
takes up the pen and writes.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and
guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He know
s where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through ag
ain.
H. P. Lovecraft

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the tru
th about its author.
G.K. Chesterton

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great f
orce.
Dorothy Parker

If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and
that voice will be silenced.
Vincent Van Gogh

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges
Pay attention to the sound of words.
Dave Wolverton

Too often we opt for the decorative or the superficial, avoiding the beauty that
Keats associated with truth the terrible beauty, the terrifying beauty that str
ips us naked by its presence.
Deena Metzger

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can t

get a good story out of it.
Lawrence Watt-Evans

When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the
Trinity are begotten.
Meister Eckhart

Writing is a dog s life, but the only life worth living.

Gustave Flaubert

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detecto
r. This is the writer s radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

I started with all the handicaps, incapabilities, and helplessness. I didn t talk
when I was twenty. I taught myself by the act of writing.
Anaïs Nin

A man s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Ernest Hemingway

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to w

hat you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may
leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant you just don t know which. You
can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you d mapped out for your
self. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the
first place.
Trust your demon.
Roger Zelazny

Whenever they start talking foreign, observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboar
d watch, you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a ma
tter of speaking, up.
Patrick O Brian

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I cou
ldn t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert C. Benchley

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversi
ve, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
Anthony Trollope

There s no money in poetry, but then there s no poetry in money either.

Robert Graves

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things tha
t lie buried deep in my heart.
Anne Frank

We are all of us failures, at least, the best of us are.

James M. Barrie

I follow the scent of falling rain and head for the place where it is darkest. I
follow the lightning and draw near to the place where it strikes.
Navaho Chant
There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are
.
Somerset Maugham

If I don t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

Lord Byron

That terrible mood of depression of whether it s any good or not is what is known
as The Artist s Reward.
Hemingway

You can t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph
.
William Butler Yeats

Most people won t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprentic
eship in it like anything else.
Katherine Ann Porter

First thought, best thought.

Allen Ginsberg

I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sl
eep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those word
s, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Third thought, best thought.

Frank Conroy
The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut
up: this it is which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which fo
rms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body
of sulphur with mercury. Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of th
is First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the St
one, which is venerable, bright in colour, of mind sublime, and an open sea, the
Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish. But the operati
ons have a great deal of analogy one to another, to the end that those who have
not the Lynx s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost. Take heed, therefore, not to be
deceived here; for it is a truth, that in each work the Wise Artist ought to di
ssolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven s head, whiten the Blac
k, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise
Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven. Hence, Hermes sa
ys: What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is b
y separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that ou
r astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins th
e blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at th
is shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.
The Six Keys of Eudoxus

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of
them are golden only because we let them slip by.
James M. Barrie

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.
Stanislaw Lem

To look a fool is the secret of a wise man.

Edgar Allen Poe

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balanc
e.
James Joyce

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Stephen King
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to k
eep.
Scott Adams

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of
them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
P. L. Travers

The hard part is getting to the top of page one.

Tom Stoppard

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler

It s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of th
e window.
Wallace Stevens

I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me
to suck.
Aleister Crowley

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and th
en spoiling it.
Diane Johnson

Resolve and thou art free.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit
of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me
.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When people ask me how I know so much about mankind, they get a simple answer: e
verything I know about men, I learned from me.
Anton Chekhov

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is am
azed at one s luck.
Iris Murdoch

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the moder
n novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde

Writing is fighting.
Muhammad Ali

It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

The effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with
fools.
Herbert Spencer

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it
is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don t know what I did before that.
Just loafed I suppose.
P. G. Wodehouse

An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a per
son, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
Mark Twain

Enter into the object, the whole of its delicate life, feeling as it feels.
Shinkichi Takahashi

The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.
Rumi

I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open li
ttle by little into the full light.
Sir Isaac Newton

He thought and suffered a good deal, but lacked the resolution to dare, the firs
t requsite of a practicioner.
Lawrence Durrell

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you ve got it made.
Jean Giraudoux

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Emily Dickinson

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh
.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O

. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned o
ver the next few years, I began to sell.
Louis L Amour

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and v
isible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Alice Walker

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.
Charles Dickens

What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of acti
on.
Meister Eckhart

Sometimes you have to go on when you don t feel like it, and sometimes you re doing
good work when it feels like all you re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitti
ng position.
Stephen King

How to write a poem? Rip your chest wide open and pour out whatever is crowded t
here.
Pirjo Zeylon

To write must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, h
as to float to the surface of its own impulse.
Henry Miller

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you kn
ow what you want.
Lao Tzu

The secret is to start a story near the ending.

Chris Offut

Why don t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.

P. G. Wodehouse

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end but not necessarily in tha
t order.
Jean Luc Godard

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Lord Byron

God protects those he loves from worthless reading.

J.K. Lavater

Good writing is true writing.

Hemingway

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don t feel I should be doing somet
hing else.
Gloria Steinem

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Ray Bradbury

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foo
t upon his neck.
William James

I d like to have money. And I d like to be a good writer. These two can come togethe
r, and I hope they will, but if that s too adorable, I d rather have money.
Dorothy Parker

Writing is turning one s worst moments into money.

J. P. Donleavy

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat s mat is a sto
ry.
John le Carre

I guess I don t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.
Benjamin Franklin

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slip
pery and thought is viscous.
Henry Brooks Adams

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree wh
ich does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without
the fear that after them may come no summer.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Write what comes up.

Barbara Turner-Vesselago

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
Flannery O Connor

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but on
e who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung

Most writers need to write. I write for money, really. If I won the lottery, I w
ould never write another word. I would rather read.
Clarissa Dickson Wright

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said
he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then we
nt back and filled in the spaces.
Harold Ross

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are on
e.
Heraclitus

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by
any religion, by any sect.
J. Krishnamurti

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

P. G. Wodehouse

If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A poet never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.

William Butler Yeats

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be
considered as a story teller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer
combines these three storyteller, teacher, enchanter but it is the enchanter in
him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov

Outside of a dog, a man s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it s too dark to r
ead.
Groucho Marx

There is no need to imagine before you paint. Painting brings forth imagination.
Kazuaki Tanahashi

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are im
portant, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain
what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cotterell

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like
hearing the grass grow and the squirrel s heart beat, and we should die of that r
oar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot

I do not write for such dull elves as have not a deal of ingenuity themselves.
Jane Austen

Read poetry: it s quite hard.

Don Paterson

Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writ
ing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between
the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It
will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
Gertrude Stein

The inner life strengthens the outer life, and vice versa. And it is stories tha
t can unite these two precious worlds one mundane, the other mythic.
Clarrissa Pinkola Estés
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
Lawrence Kasdan

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

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 great rewriters
.
James A. Michener

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrot
e.
Mignon McLaughlin

One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.
Helen Keller

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.
Marcus Aurelius

In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have wri
tten; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
Sydney Smith

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself,
is capable of uttering profound truth.
Henry Miller

Dream making emerges from a fundamental desire for intimacy, the love of creatio
n, and the necessity to speak.
Deena Metzger
I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is no
t directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Everywhere I go I m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is

that they don t stifle enough of them. There s many a bestseller that could have be
en prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O Connor

Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, con
sider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It p
roduces great praise to a lady to spell well.
Thomas Jefferson to his daughter

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasionally the result isn t a corpse.
Tillie Olsen

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom
but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Kahlil Gibran

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the differenc
e between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observanc
e, that you o erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o erdone is from th
e purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold
as twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image
, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
William Shakespeare

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human em
otions.
James Michener
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Carl Jung

Make a list of everything you must not write about.

Deena Metzger

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages
from the best writers in the world.
G.K. Chesterton

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

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

Aleister Crowley

It s not plagiarism I m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious write

r would do.
Uniek Swain

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne Du Maurier

A work of art has an author, and yet, when perfect, it has something which is es
sentially anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
You thunder and lightning too much the reader ceases to get under the bed by and
by.
Mark Twain

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest ac
tivity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writ
er of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
Somerset Maugham

A metaphor is like a simile.

Unknown

Life s enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Lord Byron

I turn sentences around. That s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it aro
und. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I com
e back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence
around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie
down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the
beginning.
Philip Roth

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

William James

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

Elmore Leonard

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

Jane Austen

Ice-cream is exquisite what a pity it isn t illegal.

Voltaire
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either e
ntirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
Oscar Wilde

I firmly believe every book was meant to be written.

Marchette Chute

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don t listen to writers talking
about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman

Nothing is made worse or better by praise.

Marcus Aurelius

Writer s block is simply a failure of ego.

Norman Mailer

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphys

ical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rathe
r than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lo
wer worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.
Henry Miller

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn t brood. I d type a li
ttle faster.
Isaac Asimov

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no su

rprise in the reader.
Robert Frost

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of

TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God.
Robert Heinlein

A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conce
al it as well as she can.
Jane Austen

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

When you are describing,

A shape or sound or tint;
Don t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
Lewis Carroll

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Philip Larkin

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that

is the best way to get there.
H.G. Wells

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Frederich Nietzsche

I never dare to write as funny as I can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If the sex scene doesn t make you want to do it whatever it is they re doing it hasn t
been written right.
Sloan Wilson

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and the
n your story and then your story!
Ford Madox Ford

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person s reaction. In a story

in my first book, I couldn t think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma
of a certain boy, so the narrator says, I knew girls who saved his gum.
Amy Hempel

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and

wash your hands afterwards.
Robert Heinlein

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I

remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates

An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he d have somebody to look up to.
Gene Fowler

I m writing a book. I ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives
lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout
of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell

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

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Truman Capote

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones
form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
Hart Crane

Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get
to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same
with dancers, artists, and singers all the same urges with differing transporta
tion.
Graycie Harmon

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves arou
nd a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more diffic
ult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin

Why do writers write? Because it isn t there.

Thomas Berger
It s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic.
Eric A. Burns

To accuse others for one s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accu
se oneself shows that one s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor oth
ers shows that one s education is complete.
Epictetus

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Franz Kafka

Substitute damn every time you re inclined to write very; your editor will delete
it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imita
te.
Francois-Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Adults are just obsolete children.

Dr Seuss

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it
accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be
a good animal.
Herbert Spencer

People on the outside think there s something magical about writing, that you go u
p in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with
a story, but it isn t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, a
nd that s all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

William Makepeace Thackeray

I ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can t remember a
single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only revie
wer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I wo
uld die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Chekhov

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,

As those move easiest who have learn d to dance.
Alexander Pope

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
Graycie Harmon

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Gracián

Art is the proper task of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Ray Bradbury

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it s not about me. It s about the cong
regation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do
. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, I loved how you said , and
then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I neve
r said.
Reverend Sean Parker Dennison
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
William Blake

Don t use words too big for the subject. Don t say infinitely when you mean very ; other
ise you ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite
.
C. S. Lewis

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith

I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it sho
uld have.
Leonardo da Vinci

Poetry gave me back my voice.

Maya Angelou

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and ar
e shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writ
ers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Meg Chittenden

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes
.
Erasmus

Wake the happy words.

Theodore Roethke

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperamen
t, except to think him overdoing everything.
Zane Grey
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Albert Camus

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of mu
sical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going
right deep down into life and not caring a damn.
P. G. Wodehouse

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody s head.
John Updike

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Jackson Pollock

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Joseph Heller

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

Henry James

There s no such thing as writer s block. That was invented by people in California w
ho couldn t write.
Terry Pratchett

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest. The tree o
f knowledge is not the tree of life.
Lord Byron
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being
there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabakov

Writers have lives, too.

Doug Kurtz

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it s about, but the inner musi
c the words make.
Truman Capote

Be obscure clearly.
E.B. White

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is God is c
rying. And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is Probabl
y because of something you did.
Jack Handy

Writing well means never having to say, I guess you had to be there.
Jef Mallett

The end of a novel, like the end of a children s dinner-party, must be made up of
sweetmeats and sugar-plums.
Anthony Trollope

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper,
or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is
pretty far along with it. A novel s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset
of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel
is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening w
hat is already written. That is finding the theme.
Diane Johnson

Avoid cliches like the plague. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
William Safire

Don t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.
The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury

Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the
end: then stop.
Lewis Carroll

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close
friends, and then for money.
P. G. Wodehouse

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare,
or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can ma
ke such a thing really scare or ring true. That s because only a real artist knows
the anatomy of the terrible.
H. P. Lovecraft

If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me.

William Shakespeare

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million doll
ars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau

Never throw up on an editor.

Ellen Datlow

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy
accident.
W. Somerset Maugham

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Ever
y time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
E.L. Doctorow

Imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniat
ure psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know.
Jane Roberts

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

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle
.
John Cheever

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone s feelings unintentionally.

Oscar Wilde

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them
by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
Benjamin Franklin

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?

Homer Simpson

No ideas but in things.

William Carlos Williams

Writing is its own reward.

Henry Miller

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you
disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan

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.
Jack Lemmon

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Orson Scott Card

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intel
ligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo da Vinci

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly
the most valuable.
Francis Bacon
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes

The best time for planning a book is while you re doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie

We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishin
g things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.
Paracelsus

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for Post
erity.
George Ade

There is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass...unless you are

an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crab grass with suspici
on. What are it s real motives? And who sent it here in the first place? It only l
ooks like crab grass. That s what they want us to think it is. One day the crab gr
ass suit will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pen
tagon will be full of crab grass and it ll be too late. The crab grass, or what we
took to be crab grass, will dictate terms.
Phillip K. Dick

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Ursula K. LeGuin

The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance cannot in the opinion of His Majesty s G
overnment be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without
some risk of terminological inexactitude.
Winston Churchill

Novelists: fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helples
sly through the chaos of his own existence.
Fay Weldon
A writer s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man s.

William Blake

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

John Lennon

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend
upon me?
Walt Whitman

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Karl Kraus

I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it short
er.
Blaise Pascal

Don t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you ll hav
e to ram them down people s throats.
Howard Aiken

Getting ahead in a difficult profession singing, acting, writing, whatever requi

res avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against stagger
ing blows and unfair reversals.
Sophia Loren

Be curious, not judgmental.

Walt Whitman
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering and it s all over much too soon.
Woody Allen

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a co
mma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

Of course the game is rigged. Don t let that stop you if you don t play, you can t win
.
Robert Heinlein

I ve always said fantasy is sort of stealth philosophy .

Terry Goodkind

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The read
er, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. LeGuin

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addresse
d envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a
temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn t be. He is too
many people if he s any good.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
Fran Lebowitz
Writing well is the best revenge.
Dorothy Parker

What I am saying, I suppose, is that you write as if everyone is dead. Then you
face the music. I don t know any other way to keep the teeth sharp and the spirit
alive.
Lynn Freed

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of
blank paper.
Steve Martin

To anyone capable of suspending for a moment the cavortings of the rational mind
, of accepting myth for what it is not lie but the very veritable truth it needs
no great inward effort to act upon such advice. It s a matter, merely, of listeni
ng.
P. L. Travers

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

Jane Austen

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Stendhal

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those on

e has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditoriu
m of his skull.
Rod Serling

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Emily Dickinson
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In
fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is anoth
er kind of music.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Let us read and let us dance two amusements that will never do any harm to the w
orld.
Voltaire

From the first words of a fairy story, we relax not because we are entertained b
ut because we are in the presence of truthfulness.
Deena Metzger

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words.

Jonathan Swift

I ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you di
d, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
Charles Dickens

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fi
re.
Reggie Leach

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind and
to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
Michel de Montaigne

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to
prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
Anne McCaffrey

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothi
ng about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertaining
ly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

Z. N. Hurston

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Oscar Wilde

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

H.L. Mencken

Writing is the flip side of sex it s good only when it s over.

Hunter S. Thompson

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to s
ay in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
Lord Brabazon

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon

Less than an hour before, he had congratulated himself on escaping all the traps
of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the
final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
Clifford D. Simak

I don t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they re dead.
Samuel Goldwyn

An artist is his own fault.

John O Hara

Somebody is a good dreamer.

Pirjo Zeylon

Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it s damn good
for you.
J.R.R. Tolkien

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer fo
r her, or turn her into literature.
Lawrence Durrell

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own langu
age cannot be understood and appreciated.
Thomas Bulfinch

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind t
o put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.
Terry Brooks

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

Aeschylus

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins
every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
Words so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how po
tent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine
them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

They lard their lean books with the fat of others works.
Robert Burton

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely

from the author s soul.
Aldous Huxley

Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happine
ss in life without having to go to books for it.
Dorothy Parker

Nature also forges man, now a gold man, now a silver man, now a fig man, now a b
ean man.
Paracelsus

No one does anything from a single motive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I my
self deny it.
H. L. Mencken

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.

Milton Berle
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won t be able to take a brea
k from being a writer.
Stephen Leigh

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder a
nd bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaiss
ance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of dem
ocracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without
zest.
Christian Dior

I m very proud of my flops, as much as of my successes.

Francis Ford Coppola

A witty saying proves nothing.

Voltaire

What is a hero without love for mankind?

Doris Lessing

You taught me language and my profit on t is I know how to curse.

William Shakespeare

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if
he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he ll eventually ma
ke some kind of career for himself as writer.
Ray Bradbury

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different i
mmediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And y
et it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one ma
n seems nonsense to another.
Hermann Hesse

Why, sometimes I ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart.
Carlos Castaneda

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon th
e imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

O. Henry

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and fro
m the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers

Anybody can make an easy deal, but only a true agent can sell a dog.
Irving Swifty Lazar

A man s errors are his portals of discovery.

James Joyce

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the
young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in
infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must tra
in himself in ruthless intolerance that is to throw away anything that is false
no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important
thing is insight, that is to be curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why i
t is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don t think the tale
nt makes much difference, whether you ve got it or not.
William Faulkner

Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death o
f air, and earth in the death of water.
Heraclitus

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.
Emily Dickinson

If it has horses and swords in it, it s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship
in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that ll turn a st
ory with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
Debra Doyle

Keep a diary and one day it ll keep you.

Mae West

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer s life.

James Norman Hall

The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone s neurosis, and
we d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunc
h of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron

The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never
lack occasions for poems.
J. W. Goethe
He is able who thinks he is able.
Buddha

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a se
ed that will flower and come to fruition.
Isaac Asimov

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

Socrates

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Gore Vidal

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Anybody can have ideas the difficulty is to express them without squandering a q
uire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Mark Twain

How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?

E. M. Forster

It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy, observed Step
hen. Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barriste
rs.
Patrick O Brian

You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

I feel happy to terrify kids.

R. L. Stine

The question isn t who is going to let me; it s who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand

Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of it
s own accord.
Nikolai Gogol

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to
be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.
Anne Frank

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

Nikos Kazantzakis

He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.

Michel de Montaigne

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

William Makepeace Thackeray

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window an
d kiss the night air.
Franz Kafka

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
Joseph Campbell
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.
Ernest Hemingway

Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do
it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave.
Marc Lawrence

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write no
t outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else by the s
ame name.
Aldous Huxley

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf

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

Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your des

ire to make art. Tolerance for uncertainty is a prerequisite for succeeding.
David Byles and Ted Orland

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror
which waits always before or behind.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Writing is a product of silence.
Carrie Latet

Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, i

ntroduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Goin
g into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end that is what you must be abl
e to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

Mark Twain

There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common
: a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way
down.
Kurt Vonnegut

If you wait for inspiration, you re not a writer, but a waiter.

Louis L Amour

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
Nikos Kazantzakis

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire aroun
d it.
Anthony Burgess
I don t have to have faith, I have experience.
Joseph Campbell

To go against sense, to go against reason, to deliberately deconstruct the world

of grammar and thoughtful orderliness is, in effect, to destroy the world as we
know it and allow something new to emerge. Grammar is, above all, a system of t
hought and perception, the way the world is defined and primary relationships ar
e perceived.
Deena Metzger

Big words are always punished.

Sophocles

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

William Least Heat-Moon

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn t matter. I m not sure a bad
person can write a good book. If art doesn t make us better, then what on earth i
s it for?
Alice Walker

Observe, don t imitate.

John M. Ford

I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting mere
tricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal f
oreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously a
cquired.
Patrick O Brian

The proper use of imagination can propel ideas in the direction you desire.
Jane Roberts

Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighte
r of him.
Louis L Amour

I desired dragons with a profound desire.

J.R.R. Tolkien

In the aftermath of the crisis, tulip mania gave way to tulip-phobia. The profes
sor of botany at Leyden, Evrard Forstius, was said to be so incensed by the flow
er that he could not see a tulip without attacking it viciously with his stick.
Edward Chancellor

Should I lose my demons, wherefore my angels?

Nathanial Hawthorne

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down
this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of
their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats

Fear is excitement without the breath.

Robert Heller

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The harde
st way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a g
reat thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Pablo Neruda

I still can t decide which is more fun reading or writing.

Rex Stout

Doughnuts. Is there anything they can t do?

Homer Simpson

From a technical point of view there are two essential things to solve or create
when writing a novel. The first is the invention of the narrator. I think the n
arrator is the most important character in a novel. In some cases this importanc
e is obvious because the narrator is also a central figure, a central character
in the novel. In other cases, the narrator is not a character, not a visible fig
ure, but an invisible person whose creation is even more complicated and difficu
lt than the creation of one of the characters.
Mario Vargas Llosa

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by rea
son.
André Gide

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

William Gibson

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

John le Carre

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components.
Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different
ones, start it up and see what happens.
Frederik Pohl

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned
to do it.
Ursula K. LeGuin

If you liked being a teenager, there s something really wrong with you.
Stephen King

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his
rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.
Robertson Davies

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence,
then she would have got at the truth of things.
Virginia Woolf

A man who is a genius and doesn t know it, probably isn t.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Every artist joins a conversation that s been going on for generations, even mille
nnia, before he or she joins the scene.
John Barth

Be anything you want to be, but don t be dull.

Frank Robinson

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville

Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught.

Erno Paasilinna

No tricks.
Raymond Carver

To write is, above all else, to construct a self.

Deena Metzger

There is in each of us an ongoing story. It contains our meaning and our destiny
. And it goes on inevitably whether we pay attention to it or not.
Al Kreinheder
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which
I wrote myself.
Henry David Thoreau

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his o
wn deeds.
Harold Hayes

A writer s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the
head.
Ethel Wilson

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man s life, must place him in such a s
ituation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
Leo Tolstoy

Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its
drawbacks chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called up
on to sit down and write.
Fran Lebowitz

My task is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel.
It is, before all, to make you see. That and no more and it is everything.
Joseph Conrad

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco
, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Winston Churchill

I may as well tell you that if you are going about the place thinking things pre
tty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P. G. Wodehouse

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Philip Larkin

Following the creative is a path, but it is not a known path.

Deena Metzger

When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. Before you cut down a m
ahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should as
k permission of the keeper of the star.
Chan K in

To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

Louis L Amour

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Joseph Campbell

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Harlan Ellison

When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; yo
u see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman

Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.

Terry Josephson
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you thin
k is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson

I don t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through

not dying.
Woody Allen

Read, read, read. Read everything trash, classics, good and bad, and see how the
y do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master
. Read! You ll absorb it. Then write.
William Faulkner

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

Anne Lamott

The reality is more excellent than the report.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity
and passion, it doesn t matter a damn how you write.
Somerset Maugham

The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she re
aches out over a thousand years with her voice because the god is in her.
Heraclitus

In a thousand words I can have the Lord s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic
Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln s Gettysb
urg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were
you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams

Decide to examine the contents of your conscious mind.

Jane Roberts

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Terry Brooks

Every activity of the creative process requires that we bring spirit into form,
that we create a vessel ourselves or a work of art that can hold the spirit.
Deena Metzger

Via clear nature of mind and methods of words, the glows of meanings and direct
perceptions: with these four kinds of excellent awareness all things are manifes
t in views compassionate.
Prajna Paramita

In art economy is always beauty.

Henry James

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I like to write when I feel spiteful: it s like having a good sneeze.

D.H. Lawrence

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

William Goldman

Speak, that I may see thee.

Ben Jonson

This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me.
Winnie the Pooh
A blank piece of paper is God s way of telling us how hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh
.
Ecclesiastes

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you re a writ
er. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff s worth, without pity, and de
stroy most of it.
Colette

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Joseph Conrad

The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top.
Bob Hope

He who limps is still walking.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that want
s help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.
Dr Samuel Johnson

A book is like a man clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. Fo
r every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and
for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold
the feathers firm too near the sun.
John Steinbeck
Talent is a long patience.
Gustave Flaubert

He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer.

He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman.
He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist.
Seneca

The archetypal situation and the mythic realm hover around the perimeters of sto
ry.
Deena Metzger

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Robert Burton

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.
Garrison Keillor

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds
in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him.
Ray Bradbury

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

Hortense Calisher
Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.
Luis Buñuel

Words are a lens to focus one s mind.

Ayn Rand

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence
.
Erasmus

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one s own flesh in the inkpot,
each time one dips one s pen.
Leo Tolstoy

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interr
upted each night, it is one single notation.
Elias Canetti

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of c

ommitting suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meets with a murderer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer t
hing Life is! So unlike anything else, don t you know, if you see what I mean.
P. G. Wodehouse

Writers speak stench.

Franz Kafka

Deep writing comes from our bodies, from our breath, and from our ability to rem
ain solid in the places that scare us.
Laraine Herring

What I would say to a young person trying to become a writer is Don t. It won t make
any difference because they ll do it anyway, but they really shouldn t.
Robert Burton

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write
know anything.
Walter Bagehot

When the sun hit that bonnet just right, I could swear I saw angels in her hair.
Billy-Bob Hornwinkle

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on tha
t thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The clothes make the man. Naked people contribute little or nothing to society.
Mark Twain

It s just my smart ass gorglings.

Pirjo Zeylon

Editing is Human, free-writing Divine!

Milli Thornton

I am so clever that sometimes I don t understand a single word of what I am saying

.
Oscar Wilde

One extends one s limits only by exceeding them.

M. Scott Peck

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can t blunt the edge of wit or the point of sa
tire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediatel
y clear.
James Thurber

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Ogden Nash

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

Dante Alighieri

The best things in life aren t things.

Art Buchwald

I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundit
s. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language c
onvey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most ar
tists and all humbug.
Cyril Connolly

I am two with nature.

Woody Allen

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows u
p.
Pablo Picasso

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it

becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The las
t phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you ki
ll the monster and fling him out to the public.
Winston Churchill
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There are two kinds of light the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscu
res.
James Thurber

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painti
ng has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock

The best stories don t come from good vs. bad but from good vs. good.
Leo Tolstoy

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world
that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped,
related, moulded and constructed in a personal form and an original manner.
Goethe

One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stu
ck between her lower left molars, and who couldn t get it out all day long. I thou
ght that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than de
ntal floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss
would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in
his mouth with a finger.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

Jules Renard

Too clever is dumb.

Ogden Nash

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.

Francis Bacon

He had the look of one who had drained the cup of life and found a dead beetle a
t the bottom.
P. G. Wodehouse

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

James Thurber

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Every secret of a writer s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of hi
s mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf

All books are either dreams or swords,

You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy Lowell

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully
done it.
Henry James

These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me anchored in forty feet
of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thou
sands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the m
oonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fish
es which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet o
f line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feel
ing a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extr
emity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.
At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking
and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, wh
en your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to
feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Natur
e again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well
as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two
fishes as it were with one hook.
Henry David Thoreau

It s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

John Wooden

Spinning straw into gold is not just a pretty phrase or an image from a fanciful
tale but is a real activity.
Deena Metzger

A new character has come on the scene. I am sure I did not invent him, I did not
even want him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien.
J.R.R. Tolkien

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come
out of me automatically.
James Herriot

I haven t much opinion of words. They re apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that s what
I say.
Ellen Glasgow

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

Henry David Thoreau

I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a grea
t whale to go downstairs five miles or more.
Herman Melville

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his act
ions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see
paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched s
ort of life as paradise.
Adolph Hitler

I hope that after I die, people will say of me: That guy sure owed me a lot of mo
ney.
Jack Handy

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Mark Twain

A story is: the king died, the queen died. A plot is: the king died, the queen d
ied of grief.
E. M. Forster

How every fool can play upon the word!

William Shakespeare

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in
saying exactly what you think yourself.
James Stephen

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can t tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf

Thinking is linking.
P. L. Travers

The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.

Voltaire
There are three necessary elements in a story exposition, development, and drama
. Exposition we may illustrate as John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little to
wn of X ; development as One day Mrs Fortescue told him she was about to leave him
for another man ; and drama as You will do nothing of the kind, he said.
Frank O Connor

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable tool, and therefore are mos
t economical in its use.
Mark Twain

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowh
ere do they touch upon absolute truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Franz Kafka

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations
those of libel.
James Thurber

A book is so much a part of oneself that in delivering it to the public one feel
s as if one were pushing one s own child out into the traffic.
Quentin Bell

A fool is agog at every word.

Heraclitus

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.

Ursula K. Le Guin

A ship is safe in harbor, but that s not what ships are for.
John Shedd

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to d
eal with what is most difficult.
Rainer Maria Rilke

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole

scene in itself.
Theodore Sturgeon

I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality seems to me to be the sup
reme virtue of the novel the merit upon which all its other merits hopelessly an
d submissively depend. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquis
ite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the nove
list.
Henry James

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, a teac

her, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
Franklin Jones

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard
on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
Horace

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance a s
harp, vindictive glance.
James Thurber

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays cyn
ical, but hopeful.
Rose Macaulay

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which
is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Michel Foucault

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what s burning inside y
ou. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Arthur Polotnik

I don t believe in writers block. Plumbers don t get plumbers block. Why should writin
g be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working?
Philip Pullman

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Anthony Burgess

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural e
nemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he
is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Jessamyn West

Study the rules so that you won t beat yourself by not knowing something.
Babe Didricksen Zaharias

There is one story and one story only.

Robert Graves

When my horse is running good, I don t stop to give him sugar.

William Faulkner
The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.
M.C. Escher

Always write with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write
as if it was being read aloud or spoken.
C. S. Lewis

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a w
riter never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener

I do like a little romance, just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys
. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no go
od at all, if you haven t got that.
Anthony Trollope

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Carl Jung

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Douglas Adams

His words were simple words enough

And yet he used them so
That what in other mouths was rough
In his seemed musical and low.
James Russell Lowell

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

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being
there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabakov

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

John O Hara

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
William Butler Yeats

A writer s duty is to register what it is like to be in the world.

Zadie Smith

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beginning is always today.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobo
dy calls.
Henry David Thoreau

I do not think I have ever prayed in words. I pray in conscious desire. I pray i
n concepts concepts of whole ideas, not parts. I never go to sleep at night with
out consciously thinking that kind of prayer in which I express desire in whole
ideas of what my day for the morrow must be. I do not weaken my prayer by trying
to find words for it. I keep my desire strong by not thus dividing it into word
s or in parts. My prayers are communions, not conversations.
Walter Russell

Nothing builds confidence like accomplishment.

Thomas Carlyle

The Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. A c
avity. Something to focus everything up: to engender an event like an egg.
E. M. Forster

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Lao Tzu

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

G. K. Chesterton

Do you know, Peter asked, why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to liste
n to the stories.
James M. Barrie

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it t
eaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
J P Donleavy

The beautiful part of writing is that you don t have to get it right the first tim
e, unlike, say, brain surgery.
Robert Cormier
Contact with the larger story is imperative in order to gain wisdom and to resto
re those parts of ourselves that become amputated in a secular society.
Deena Metzger

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read,
and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald

Everything changes when you change.

Jim Rohn

The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

William Butler Yeats

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Elizabeth Bowen

And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, a
nd a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.
Jack Kerouac

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expect
ed to see an author and find a man.
Blaise Pascal

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

Katherine Mansfield

Start early and work hard. A writer s apprenticeship usually involves writing a mi
llion words (which are then discarded) before he s almost ready to begin. That tak
es a while.
David Eddings
You must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you brea
k through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.
Gardner Dozois

I have written a great many stories and I still don t know how to go about it exce
pt to write it and take my chances.
John Steinbeck

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli

I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tre
ad softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats

Insanity is the illusion you are wrong.

Verber Quimply

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevita
bly confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn t quit.

Richard Bach

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can t read
them.
Mark Twain
Save me the first dance in your dreams tonight.
Frank Sinatra

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as prai

sed. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon
fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas
that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you el
iminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow r
emain.
Elie Wiesel

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Lao Tzu

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the hum
orist makes fun of himself.
James Thurber

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I could just do the whole thing in one day but sadly my character had gone to be
d at the end of the last scene.
Sandra Jensen

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisf
action. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you
really want to say.
Mark Twain

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Anthony Trollope
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their c
haracters want something right away even if it s only a glass of water.
Kurt Vonnegut

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

James Frey

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from
that which is above, working the miracles of one.
Hermes Trismegistus

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

William Butler Yeats

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

Elmore Leonard

Anyone who believes you can t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
David Ben Gurion

There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a
period placed at just the right moment.
Isaac Babel

All my life I ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Kahlil Gibran
Read almost any newspaper interview, and you ll conclude that the dialogue of real
people is more stilted and implausible than the dialogue of invented characters
. Trying to make real people sound real on the page is necessarily an exercise i
n impressionism. Nothing teaches one the subtleties of punctuation so well as an
attempt to take a skein of actual speech and restore to it the pauses, ellipses
, switches of tone and speed, that it had in life.
Jonathan Raban

It is all very well to write books, but can you wiggle your ears?
James M. Barrie

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose I m one of those fellows my father always warned me against.

P. G. Wodehouse

Art is elimination of the unnecessary.

Waldo Salt

Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and w
hy they were in the plane to begin with.
Nancy Ann Dibble

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Henrik Ibsen

When the book comes out it may hurt you but in order for me to do it, it had to
hurt me first.
James Baldwin

The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.
Somerset Maugham
Just because I don t care doesn t mean I don t understand.
Homer Simpson

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dream
ers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any les
s magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he h
as tried writing at night.
H. P. Lovecraft

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils
to contest his vision.
Norman Mailer

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they th
ink other folks think they think.
Ethan Hubbard

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.
Frank Frazetta

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Abraham Lincoln

If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you
a member of it.
Art Buchwald

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of

the traveler that does the howling.
Henry David Thoreau

Kindness in words creates confidence.

Lao Tzu
Think before you speak, is criticism s motto; speak before you think is creation s.
E. M. Forster

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following on
e it should be fired. Otherwise don t put it there.
Anton Chekhov

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I ll meet you th
ere.
Rumi

Whatever fortune brings, don t be afraid of doing things.

Herman Melville

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and
hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been
a weird little kid.
Katherine Paterson

So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that s al
ive in your heart. That s the one you have to write.
Lurleen McDaniel

How does one get to be a bit of a bee?

P. L. Travers

You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you
see.
Jane Roberts
I was a free man in Paris.
Joni Mitchell

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

G. B. Shaw

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam

People die, but books never die.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination

encircles the world.
Albert Einstein

The blank page gives the right to dream.

Gaston Bachelard

The poet is the one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anaïs Nin

A year from now you ll wish you had started today.

Karen Lamb

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

T. S. Eliot
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the
wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
William Butler Yeats

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine

Please, she whispered as she opened the book, please get me out of here just for an
hour or so, please take me far, far away.
Cornelia Funke

A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way
of the thing: up down up down.
Virginia Woolf

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things,

his own consciousness.
Bill Barich

Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

John Steinbeck

As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Geniu
s; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Pro
verbs.
William Blake

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H. P. Lovecraft

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Jack Kerouac
It takes an awful long time to not write a book.
Douglas Adams

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled

in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon

To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy and dull fantasy
at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
Robert A. Heinlein

Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Jung

Nothing will work unless you do.

Maya Angelou

The writer s only responsibility is to his art.

William Faulkner

The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your con
trol.
Ogden Nash

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

William Blake

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in

certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To be strict without being t
oo self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to think it s going well (or not too b
adly), simply to keep rowing along.
Susan Sontag
When in doubt, go to your where.
Viola Spolin

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

James Thurber

Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.

Confucius

Hold a book in your hand and you re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Hebrew Saying

I wrote no words this day.

Lynda Carnes

Let the readers do some of the work themselves.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold,

and leaves of gold there grew.
Of wind I sang, a wind there came
and in the branches blew.
J.R.R. Tolkien

The use of point of view is to bring the reader into immediate and continuous co
ntact with the heart of the story and sustain him there.
Tom Jenks

When I read it, I don t wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
Norman Mailer

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Erma Bombeck

I love to doubt as well as know.

Dante Alighieri

To finish is a sadness to a writer a little death. He puts the last word down an
d it is done. But it isn t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer be
hind, for no story is ever done.
John Steinbeck

The loveship of her Guardian was all she knew of men.

Bernice Ellis

A child of three once said to me, I am two boys, Goodly and Badly. Alas, too young
for this! I thought, but at the same time recalled that truth requires us to be
young, no matter what our age. And then came the faltering, anxious question Whi
ch do you like best? I knew the answer, and all the breadth and depth of it, but
had to appear to pay it mind. If I chose Goodly, then Badly would be in the wild
erness, alone with his badliness and lost. If Badly, then Goodly would be in the
same plight, alone with his goodliness. Joy and woe are woven fine/A clothing fo
r the soul divine. To tell you the truth, I said gravely, I like them both the same.
The look of anxiety turned to relief and a trustful hand met mine.
Pamela Travers

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what
you ve got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it im
pending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking
to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf

The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.
Astrid Weber

Don t plan anything.

Write what comes up.
Give all the details.
Go fearward.
Don t edit.
Barbara Turner-Vesselago

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

A. A. Milne

If a book is not alive in the writer s mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit.

Stephen King

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I ll tell you a story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain t
op, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, happy, absorbed and quietl
y putting one bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland

A story isn t about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.
W. D. Wetherell

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
Donald Barthelme

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so muc
h aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the
heart s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in
the amiable self-assertion of youth.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Problems in writing can come unknotted in a miraculous way after a nap. I go to

sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.
Patricia Highsmith

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Max Ernst

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can t forgive.
Salman Rushdie

Sometimes if I m stuck for a word I just put X easy to search for later when I com
e to edit.
Sandra Jensen

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated th

rough you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this
expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any othe
r medium and it will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it i
s nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.
Martha Graham

Liberty doesn t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Will Rogers

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all th
e years we have lived.
Helen Keller

You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it s
going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.
Madeleine L Engle

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark.

H. P. Lovecraft

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me
some coffee.
Abraham Lincoln

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams,

Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
William Butler Yeats

There s nothing more empty than a life devoted to leisure.

George Hamilton

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret
of style.
Matthew Arnold

I think taste is a social concept, not an artistic one. Our reading life is too sh
ort for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another s bra
in in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with o
urselves.
John Updike

Always behave as though tomorrow is the day.

Buck Henry

You can t try to do things; you simply must do them.

Ray Bradbury

Something was swinging from a slightly bowed branch.

Michelle Bidwell

You can do whatever you want through imagination and characters when writing fic
tion. Anything.
Michael Swerdloff

Plain words are special to me.

Bernice Ellis

I am starting to fall in love with Quinlan. It s going to suck when I have to kill
him.
Leigh-Anne Tyson

Says the God of Art: I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Al
so beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. No
ne of these you shall have continually, and of their comings and goings you shal
l not be foretold.
Howard Lindsay

I m dying to get into some action.

Sandra Jensen

Every time I sit down, someone else is speaking.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

Creativity means that I access.

Jeanne Beauchamp Adwani

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Leonardo da Vinci
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascina
tion.
H. P. Lovecraft

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never yet been set up a stat
ue in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:

Fool! said my Muse to me, look to thy heart and write.
Sir Philip Sidney

I am bigger than the spider.

Bernice Ellis

The story will only go as far as the author will allow it.
Michael Swerdloff

Fiction is about stuff that s screwed up.

Nancy Kress

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

James Joyce

I am a man, and alive. For this reason I am a novelist.

D.H. Lawrence

I m trying not to wonder because if I wonder too much, doubt may take over and the
n I ll never get it done.
Andrea Mauk
Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory spor
t.
George V. Higgins

Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake

I want to leap into a new future for myself.

Bernice Ellis

Forget absolutely everything you thought you were or are going to do. Just write
whatever and count the words.
Gabriele Stehle

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

P. G. Wodehouse

Love is what you ve been through with somebody.

James Thurber

It s about keeping technique from interrupting the creative process.

Kellie Hall

Swallowing All whole, cleansing through Perfection, I hear the grass grow, I am
One with the rodent s heartbeat. In the bliss of Eleven, I die of the roar which l
ies on the other side of silence, becoming One with that Silence, Om.
Claire Born

Go for dialogue.
Sandra Jensen

Probably morning is best for me.

Jenni Sulkow

I tumble together to a mound, unable to concern myself.

Pirjo Zeylon

Who knows what spawn can spring from such lunatic loins of evil?
Herbunger Vladstaff

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
Abraham Lincoln

Think where man s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such frien
ds.
William Butler Yeats

Standing at the edge of the cliff and helping others leap is easier than leaping
.
Michael Swerdloff

It s like the novel is writing itself.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it
is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow

I am an actor at heart. I just acted out my story and then wrote it down.
Mame Burkett

Can we really heal and forgive if we don t see both roles in a play as one?
Pirjo Zeylon
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Zen proverb

They just discovered the windshield was covered in butterfly wings.

Leigh-Anne Tyson

Chronology plays no part in what I ve written to date.

Lindsay McLeod Espinoza

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn
no money.
Jules Renard

The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession.

George Sand

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocab
ulary, looking for long words because you re maybe a little bit ashamed of your sh
ort ones.
Stephen King

I want my novel.
Bernice Ellis

If I get out of the way, much happens.

Michael Swerdloff

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education sometime
s it s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E. B. White
Pot of tea check. Raining outside check.
Leigh-Anne Tyson

I m not surprised that you are falling in love with Mr. Big.
Michelle Bidwell

One word at a time. That s the only way to write the elephant.
Jody Strimling-Muchow

Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you m
ost desperately want to read.
Susan Isaacs

The rule of the writer is not to say what we can say but what we are unable to s
ay.
Anaïs Nin

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.
Molière

I began to love her in my dreams.

Michelle Bidwell

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want to be successful, it s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love
what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.
Will Rogers

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon
and waiting for an echo.
Don Marquis

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore

I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.

George Bernard Shaw

She was drunk and broke her toe.

Sandra Jensen

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Norman Mailer

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Resistance, what are you supporting in me?

Bernice Ellis

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

Lao Tzu

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few so
uls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take
over God s business.
Flannery O Connor

If 12 is a circle then 13 is the spiral when the circle is opened.

Lindsay McLeod Espinoza
It s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
L. P. Hartley

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightma
re.
Alfred Hitchcock

I can hardly wait for November to start.

Gabriele Stehle

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stori
es.
Carl Gustav Jung

To listen with everything that I am

For the low sweet tones
Of the coming night
In the last rays of golden sunlight
My heart wanders in the lines and curves
Of the branches overhead
Among the leaves now opened wide
In this moment s expression
Leaning against the worn trunk
I watch the deepening sky
Spread out like the palm of my hand
Silence courts the field
Even the birds have found stillness
As the stars emerge with their inky partners
To dance to the moon s song
I find under the cover of oak and evening
My heart emptied out and cradled
In hopes and dreams just imagined
And I realize I have been holding my breath
Waiting for this moment to become
Leigh-Anne Tyson

What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.
Oscar Wilde

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong
reason.
T. S. Eliot

The writing in itself is still literally crap, but I can make it hit like a sled
gehammer when I can go back and put all my love and all my heart in.
Pirjo Zeylon

The best method for writing is to do it.

Michael Swerdloff

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

James Thurber

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I just wrote.
Leigh-Anne Tyson

Reading is a sort of rewriting.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the
private world public, that s what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg
So I ll stick by this fonting thing.
Sandra Jensen

Apple seed learned me something.

Bernice Ellis

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your
own work.
William Gibson

My right foot is in a cast for the second time this year...don t ask.
Jody Strimling-Muchow

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, wh

y shouldn t we?
Audra Foveo-Alba

i never think at all when i write

nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
Archy

Suck it in and live it my love, suck it in and live it. We are writers now and t
here is no turning back.
Bernice Ellis

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with th

e art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel
at all.
Joyce Carol Oates

Now I can smell it too, the cunning 50.

Pirjo Zeylon
Sometimes I feel like a writer.
Michael Swerdloff

My work is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in aff
irmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for th
e sake of faith in faith itself.
Miguel de Unamuno

I don t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know
it has got to get down to work.
Pearl S. Buck

Are all your stars shining?

JD Salinger

How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor a
nd missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his inte
ntions were good.
Mark Twain

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.

Benjamin Franklin

I have this day shall I make it count?

Pirjo Zeylon

Freefall is an extraordinary process, one which has turned many from I want to be
a writer to being writers.
Sandra Jensen

It has made me the gunman who does not hesitate to draw. I can draw now, anytime
.
Pirjo Zeylon
Life can t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itsel
f is a writer s lover until death fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacher
ous, constant.
Edna Ferber

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitu
te for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist ha

s experienced.
Leo Tolstoy

If you haven t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, an
d maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you ll o
nly have to throw away the first three pages.
William Campbell Gault

When you take stuff from one writer, it s plagiarism; but when you take it from ma
ny writers, it s research.
William Mizner

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely f
or the reading of it.
Elizabeth Drew

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson

Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.
William Shakespeare

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single s
econd.
Gustave Flaubert

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.

Paavo Haavikko

In good writing, words become one with things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Novelty disturbs and repels.

Simone de Beauvoir

To my dear children, without whose constant love and affection this book would h
ave been finished in half the time.
P. G. Wodehouse

That s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay cl
oser attention.
Richard Ford

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because

I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I d be a politician.
Eugene Ionesco

Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself.
Lewis Carroll

Since when was genius found respectable?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When I was sitting writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learni
ng would have given me, from a chink in the floor that let me hear what was bein
g said by the servant girls in the kitchen.
J. M. Synge

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all o
ur tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other wo
rk is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Henry David Thoreau

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Abraham Lincoln

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living i
n attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful write
r or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Sinclair Lewis

The subject of all this is not two camels. There is only one lost camel, but lan
guage has difficulty saying that.
Rumi

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners name
s. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
Mignon McLaughlin

Writers don t need love; all they require is money.

John Osborne

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do
that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you it will
come out of that wall.
Anton Chekhov

Remarks are not literature.

Gertrude Stein

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters to set
a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Make the drummer sound good.

Steve Lacy

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be or
iginal: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how
often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original
without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal in
scription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valery

If you don t allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, i
t would be hard to write something very good.
Steven Galloway

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Perspective is key.
Lindsay McLeod Espinoza

From the moment I picked up your book till I laid it down I was convulsed with l
aughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

W. Somerset Maugham

There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like one is to tell them
what they don t understand; and the other is to tell them what they re used to.
George Eliot

There s more of yourself in a book than a play. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlow
e was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.
Sir John Mortimer
 That, I replied cordially, is what it doesn t do anything else but.
P. G. Wodehouse

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau

An economist is a man who knows a hundred ways of making love but doesn t know any
women.
Art Buchwald

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
William Blake

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Emily Dickinson

Let me walk through the fields of paper, touching with my wand dry stems and stu
nted butterflies.
Denise Levertov

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don t remove it I might be writing in my d

reams.
Danzae Pace

My relatives say that they are glad I m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
Kurt Vonnegut

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional s
incerity.
George Orwell

No, it s not a very good story its author was too busy listening to other voices t
o listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen King

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a co
ld-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possi
ble.
Edna Ferber

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

Mark Twain

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

Kahlil Gibran

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. The
y must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.
Zane Grey

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire
to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall

Teaching writing is a hustle.

Cormac McCarthy

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives i
n our very blood?
Carl Jung

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approac
h for the rest of the time. The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein

Every word written is a victory against death.

Michel Butor

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must
see the world.
George Bernard Shaw

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Emily Dickinson

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak
about. Be willing to be split open.
Natalie Goldberg

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to wo
rk.
Carl Sandburg

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren t very new at a
ll.
Abraham Lincoln

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings the tune wit
hout words, and never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson

Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep

Of dim inconscient infinity
A Power arose from the insentient deep,
A flame-whirl of magician Energy.
Sri Aurobindo

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what de
stroys it can be told.
André Gide
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and c
onscious one.
Salman Rushdie

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

Herman Melville

It is personalities not principles that move the age.

Oscar Wilde

You have to know the human heart.

Thom Jones

Rule one of reading other people s stories is that whenever you say well that s not c
onvincing the author tells you that s the bit that wasn t made up.
Neil Gaiman

Better is the enemy of good.

Voltaire

New writers are often told, Write what you know. I would broaden that by saying, Wr
ite what you know emotionally.
Marjorie Franco

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play
it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a la
ter place in the book, or for another book give it, give it all, give it now. So
me more will arise for later, something better. Anything you do not give freely
and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing b
ooks are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The
greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

William Blake

I m nobody, who are you?

Emily Dickinson

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed
up.
Oscar Wilde

I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of
any weakness.
Zane Grey

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

Carlos Castaneda

Watch where you dive, there are rocks where you cannot see them, they can bruise
and break your bones without warning. They can also shake off the old layers of
skin and fat that are not necessary nor supportive of your journey as writer, f
riend, lover, or human. So dive, and then dive again and again. The waters are h
ealing and fresh. Go ahead and dive with your eyes closed but open. Dive deeper.
The force of the river will carry you to your destination clean, scraped, and s
crubbed. Dive deeper.
Michael Swerdloff

You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of
these may be completely unknown to you now.
Chris Baty

I have traveled a path and followed a thought and it has all supported me in my
unfolding.
Bernice Ellis
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka

Books want to be born: I never make them.

Samuel Butler

A book is one of the few havens remaining where your mind can get both provocati
on and privacy.
Edward P. Morgan

Work is love made visible.

Kahlil Gibran

When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone s wanting anything, you exclude the
reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.
Kurt Vonnegut

In a good play, everyone is in the right.

Fredrich Hebbel

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Robert Southey

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

The only need is the eye to see.

Willa Cather

One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapo
ck. The skin of the world was very vast. To be a man after rediscovering a milli
on years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange,
unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things.
Satprem

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Oscar Wilde

Don t sweat the petty things, and don t pet the sweaty things.
Groucho Marx

The last words I write of a book are very often the first, so it doesn t much matt
er how you start.
Raymond Hill

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who ll get me a
book I ain t read.
Abraham Lincoln

I m normally not a praying man, but if you re up there, please save me Superman.
Homer Simpson

Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.

Dante Alighieri

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Jorge Luis Borges

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter
of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learn
ing to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportu
nities for exercising wit.
Lewis Carroll

Write a page a day. It will add up.

Herman Wouk

I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of ti
me, toil, or torture.
Zane Grey

Write from the soul. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
Jeffrey A. Carver

There are four stages in a marriage. First there s the affair, then the marriage,
then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woma
n, the divorce.
Norman Mailer

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to th
e heart.
William Butler Yeats

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, an
d mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors
.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree.
Ezra Pound

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

Oscar Levant
Dream as if you ll live forever. Live as if you ll die today.
James Dean

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble edu
cation; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one
must also be able to dance with the pen?
Friedrich Nietzsche

What s the product that is imbued with the most value, and the most meaning, and i
s the most important thing in the world? Without a doubt, that is books.
Emma Barnes

Self-confidence can be crippling.

Leonard Michaels

All good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough,
and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that which people li
ke you will enjoy. Write what you care about and understand.
Richard North Patterson

No tale tells all.

Alexei Panshin

I always write about my own experiences, whether I ve had them or not.

Ron Carlson

It is only a woman s cookery, to be sure, he said, toying with a chocolate mousse, an

d I do not know that I should trust her with game, but within these wide limits,
how very good it is! She must be a knowing old soul, with great experience, no
doubt in excellent service before the Revolution. Perhaps something of a slut: y
our amiable slut makes the best of cooks.
Patrick O Brian

Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.

John Gardner

There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Mark Strand

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who p

roduced him.
James Baldwin

There fell into my hands a gilded book, very old and large, which cost me only t
wo florins. It was not made of paper or parchment as other books are, but of adm
irable rinds, as it seemed to me, of young trees. The book contained thrice seve
n leaves, so numbered at the top of each folio, every seventh leaf having painte
d images and figures instead of writing. On the first of these seven leaves ther
e was depicted a virgin who was being swallowed by serpents; on the second a Cro
ss upon which a serpent was crucified; on the last a wilderness watered by many
fair fountains, out of which came a number of serpents.
Nicholas Flamel

When people tell you something s wrong or doesn t work, they are almost always right
. When they tell you exactly what s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost alway
s wrong.
Neil Gaiman

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers to a
pply them to the expression of my own thoughts.
Shirley Ann Grau

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Cynthia Ozick

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
Homer Simpson

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. What I began by reading, I
must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

Emily Dickinson

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer s role is almost superfluous.
He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
J. G. Ballard

The doer alone learneth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Dante Alighieri

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It seems so calculating.
Oscar Wilde

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to c
opy a great deal; the good one really does.
William Blake

God wasn t too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

John Barth

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and
climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I don t know exactly how it s done. I let it alone a good deal.
Saul Bellow

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.
Richard Wilbur

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begin
s to move, all I can 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

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you re doomed.
Ray Bradbury

Style, like the human body, is especially beautiful when the veins are not promi
nent and the bones cannot be counted.
Tacitus

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Anthony Burgess

Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wr
ote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and t
hrough moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Edgar A. Poe

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer s life.

James Norman Hall

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plot
s. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudg
e against life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

George Eliot

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the pr
ice of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other
artist you must learn your craft.
Phyllis A. Whitney

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of

the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil but there is no way around them.
Isaac Asimov

An essential element for good writing is a good ear.

Barbara Tuchman

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King

I wrote a few children s books not on purpose.

Steven Wright

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there
is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn t every narrative lead back to Oedi
pus? Isn t storytelling always a way of searching for one s origin, speaking one s con
flicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Roland Barthes

No tale is so good but can be spoilt in the telling.

Terence
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be eno
ugh.
Meister Eckhart

Storytelling reveals meaning without defining it.

Hannah Arendt

There s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons

That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes.
Emily Dickinson

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Jorge Luis Borges

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things i
n that which is small.
Lao Tzu

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Benjamin Franklin

You have no enemy except yourselves.

St. Francis of Assisi

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the gen
itals and the tongue.
Leonardo da Vinci
I ve always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is and it s me.
Homer Simpson

It s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Lewis Carroll

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand
himself, and to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings
satisfactions, is a curious anticlimax.
Alfred Kazin

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau

Humour is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.

P. G. Wodehouse

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live alon
g some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is ju
st an embroidered potholder.
Raymond Chandler

Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.

Jack Warner

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fa
me, the gods have called him.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
May Sarton

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.

G. I. Gurdjieff

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from the
ir flame philosophy lights its torch.
Marquis de Sade

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his so

ul.
W. Somerset Maugham

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are things known, there are things unknown, in between are doors.
Jim Morrison

Everything popular is wrong.

Oscar Wilde

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, w
hen the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, o
n horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found m
yself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House
of Usher.
Edgar Allen Poe

Never confuse movement with action.

Ernest Hemingway

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by
nature.
William Shakespeare

I have one major rule: everybody is right.

Ken Wilber

A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiousity and bewild

erment.
William Trevor

The human race is the basis on which heaven is founded.

Emanuel Swedenborg

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity o
f all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hol
d it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping
his wings and emitting defiant howls. This being forbidden by the police of all
civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his howls on paper. Such is the th
ing called self-expression.
H. L. Mencken

It is meaningless to complain. What s important from this point on is the strategy

of your life.
Carlos Castaneda

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

E. B. White
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it i
s the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute
intimacy.
Paul Auster

Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That s the only thing you really
know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.
Marianne Williamson

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

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of t
he chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse

Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility is a fool an

d a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven.
I admire the authority of being on one s knees in front of the event.
Harold Brodkey

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on
boring future generations.
Charles de Montesquieu

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is
done alone.
Ursula K. LeGuin

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that th
e gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one s courage.

Anaïs Nin
Artists and poets must find the light in which they can find themselves.
Frances Kelly

I try to envision the story as a silent movie before I start adding dialogue.
John Sayles

Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has
someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really
like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make
the character stand up and be somebody.
John Gardner

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never
read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

Dante Alighieri

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That s my religion.
Abraham Lincoln

Words cannot express things;

Speech does not convey the spirit.
Swayed by words, one is lost;
Blocked by phrases, one is bewildered.
The oak tree in the garden.
Once you see it, dreams fade away.
Mumon
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
W. Somerset Maugham

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

They do not grasp how being at variance it agrees with itself, a backward-turnin
g adjustment like that of the bow or lyre.
Heraclitus

It s money and adventure and fame! It s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyag
e that starts at six o clock tomorrow!
James Creelman and Ruth Rose

Unless you enter the tiger s den, you cannot take the cubs.
Japanese proverb

Why is language most efficacious when it says one thing through meaning another?
Jacques Lacan

abracadabraabracadabra
bracadabraabracadabr
racadabraabracadab
acadabraabracada
cadabraabracad
adabraabraca
dabraabrac
abraabra
braabr
raab
aa
Unknown

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Anthony Burgess

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is

, infinite.
William Blake

Trouble shadows the Home Tribe. You hear its call. The land is barren, and someo
ne must go beyond. A figure emerges from the campfire smoke, an elder pointing t
o you. You have been chosen as Seeker. You will venture your life so the greater
life of the Home Tribe may go on.
Christopher Vogler

The path comes into existence only when we observe it.

Heisenberg

Goose, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These when inked and drawn me
chanically across paper by a person called an author, there results a very fair an
d accurate transcript of the fowl s thought and feeling.
Ambrose Bierce

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or t
hinking about writing.
Eugene Ionesco

A novelist is a person who lives in other people s skins.

E. L. Doctorow

Every word born of an inner necessity.

Etty Hillesum

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather, and a little music out of do
ors, played by somebody I do not know.
John Keats

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than argume
nts.
Joyce Cary
I am irritated by my own writing.
Gustave Flaubert

The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

Edmund Gosse

The writer must have a more than ordinary capacity for life.
Paul Engle

Our high respect for a well-read person is praise enough for literature.
T. S. Eliot

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite o er-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania, sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
William Shakespeare

There s no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must
crash through or perish.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert

The fact is that all time is simultaneous. In a simultaneous time, punishment ma

kes no sense. The punishment as an event and the event for which you are being p
unished exist at once; and since there is no past, present and future, you could
just as well say that the punishment came first.
Seth

Humbly receiving death and life, to hell I release all claim, and with new eyes
see my eternal love leaving.
Miguel Angel Ruiz

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

Publication is the auction of the Mind of Man.

Emily Dickinson

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a
criterion for your own writing. And then trust it and yourself.
Rosemary Daniell

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

Elizabeth Bowen

There are some books that refuse to be written. There is only one right form for
a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.
Mark Twain

Load every rift with ore.

John Keats

Literature is the rediscovery of childhood.

Georges Bataille
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subj
ect has to tell him.
Rachel Carson

A man s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of ar
t, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first
opened.
Albert Camus

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
Emily Dickinson

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can

find information upon it.
Dr Samuel Johnson

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, onc
e and for all, who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

Lao Tzu

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.

Jim Morrison

One doesn t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a
very long time.
André Gide
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. Somerset Maugham

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

Karl Kraus

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of
talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn t like that at all. It may be
more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there s a g
reat, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.
Alan Garner

There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an

art.
Lawrence Watt-Evans

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will
do.
Thomas Jefferson

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its charact
ers and plot and happened somewhere else. Fiction depends for its life on place.
Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened?
Who s here? Who s coming?
Eudora Welty

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others
to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with fo
lly.
Erasmus

There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I
am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola

Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only
way I could get across the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction w
ith telling lies.
Malidoma Patrick Some

It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is
such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
Ernest Hemingway

Energy is eternal delight.

William Blake

You re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
Timothy Leary

A full tide and a warm wind,

A wish to set my home,
If freedom dreamed belongs to me,
It sails upon the foam.
Child of the extremes,
You learn the lessons slow,
You cover many traveled turns
And build the unclaimed road.
A path taught to me yesterday
May still inside me glow,
But farther out upon the way
A footstep never shows.
Scott Jeffries

Where we go now is new.

Bernice Ellis

Learning is also important for the warrior in times of peace.

Budoshoshinshu
The brain has a tendency toward chronic blaming.
Dr. Paul Pearsall

If you have men who will exclude any of God s creatures from the shelter of compas
sion and pity, you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.
St. Francis of Assisi

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools
cannot recognize.
James Joyce

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his frien
ds.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Imagine
Create
Become
Leigh-Anne Tyson

Waste my heart on fear no more.

John O Donohue

It s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire

universe of your own creating.
Gustave Flaubert

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
Gilbert Highet

Why dance the praise? So the words can be formed in the motion of the body. So t
he spirit emerges from the very cauldron, the heat and fire of the self. For the
 reason that some writers always use a pen for various drafts, rather than a mac
hine, the better to feel the physical intimacy of the event of writing.
Deena Metzger

Beliefs may need to be restructured rather than denied.

Jane Roberts

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry
of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
John Ruskin

I would rather be ashes than dust.

Jack London

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explain
ed.
Mark Twain

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been
rejected.
W. Somerset Maugham

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.
Samuel Goldwyn

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.

Oscar Wilde

Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell

What the font?

Leigh-Anne Tyson

The principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows them possesses the magic key bef
ore whose touch all doors of the temple fly open.
The Kybalion

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

Robert A. Heinlein

There s no secret to success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn t tell you
all about it?
Kin Hubbard

I stake my destiny upon hours of uninterrupted work.

Charles Baudelaire

The pageant of the riverbank had marched steadily along. Purple loosestrife arri
ved early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence i
ts own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sun
set cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the whi
te, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffi
dent and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if
string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, tha
t June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shephe
rd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the windo
w, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But wh
en meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his p
lace in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
Kenneth Grahame

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without acc

epting it.
Aristotle
I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be
sure of going on the next day.
Ernest Hemingway

I had discovered, early in my researches, that their hermetic doctrine was no me

re chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements
, and to man himself.
W. B. Yeats

From time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sl
eep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them.
Paracelsus

The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Eugene Herrigel

Industry need not wish.

Benjamin Franklin

Joking is teaching. Don t be fooled by the lightness or the vulgarity. Jokes are s
erious.
Rumi

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned sk
ywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
Leonardo da Vinci

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Frederic Raphael

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Ernest Hemingway
One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieve
s unity; thus two are but one. Invert nature and you will find that what you see
k. Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought.
Maria the Jewess

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

J. Krishnamurti

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that
you re writing.
Gene Wolfe

Where s your will to be weird?

Jim Morrison

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. I
t s delightful to distort size, to see something that s tiny as though it were vast.
Robert Morgan

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
Zane Grey

The brain is wider than the sky.

Emily Dickinson

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

William Blake

All my life, I ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook.

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Don t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what y
ou have to say. It s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver

It would not be better if things happened just as men wish.

Heraclitus

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of s
tyle.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Marge, don t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It s
what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.
Homer Simpson

It is a greater joy to see the author s author, than himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Still no response from my editor in New York. Almost two months now since I sent
back the manuscript. There are problems, I saw today, but nothing insurmountabl
e. It s the other thing, this silence, that sits on my chest and crushes the breat
h out of me.
Bill Barich

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don t write them d
own.
W. B. Kinsella

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that i
s idle.
Kahlil Gibran
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, th
ey are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser

Make it new.
Ezra Pound

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.

Joyce Carol Oates

The power of the symbol comes from the nature of perception and thought. The tra
in whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the fa
mily relative.
Delmore Schwartz

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying
not to smoke.
Scott Spencer

The usual way through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and
kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent
.
Danielle Steel

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Herman Melville

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicu
e at the end.
Sid Caesar

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand
years; it is middling well as far as it goes but is that all?
Walt Whitman
What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decen
t sort of fellow.
A. A. Milne

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Stendhal

I couldn t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Jonathan Winters

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don t know
the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just
an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind making it up as you go along, like a comm
on liar.
John Irving

Develop any other skill; turn to any other branch of knowledge; learn how to use
your hands. Try woodworking, bird watching, gardening, mushrooming, cooking, fi
shing, sailing, weaving, pottery, zoology, astronomy, cosmology, take your pick.
Whatever activity you engage in as trade or hobby, or field of study, will tone
up your body and clear your head. At the very least, it will help you with your
metaphors.
Stanley Kunitz

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader s intelligence or whose
attitude is patronizing.
E. B. White

The proper study of mankind is books.

Aldous Huxley

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing
it. You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
Will Rogers
When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with whi
ch to find the way.
Japanese proverb

It is better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life.

Julius Caesar

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Walt Whitman

Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he
must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronte
d by a problem in a novel he s writing he does not consult his literary background
. He feels his way to the solution.
John Gardner

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and
magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no measure or limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an aut
hor; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the
sake of filthy lucre and gain.
Martin Luther

In art, economy is always beauty.

Henry James

Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses t
o this terrifying century.
E. L. Doctorow

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can make more generals, but horses cost money.
Abraham Lincoln

A true friend stabs you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; per
haps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men
will do and know all things.
Jorge Luis Borges

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering
.
Gurdjieff

Have common sense and stick to the point.

W. Somerset Maugham

Truth is in things, and not in words.

Herman Melville

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Walt Whitman

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape findi
ng oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius

Transmute yourselves from deadstones into living philosophical stones.

Gerhardt Dorn

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book spec
ifically for children, for if you are honest you have no idea where childhood en
ds and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
P. L. Travers

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

Vincent Van Gogh

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

Jane Roberts

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Charles Dickens

If you write well, you don t have to dress funny.

James Dickey

Then what is writing of quality? To know how to thrust your head into the darkne
ss, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basical
ly a dangerous calling.
Roberto Bolaño

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.

A. A. Milne

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters
, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting
readers.
Marcus Aurelius

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as t
he body.
Benjamin Franklin

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood
.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Anybody can be good in the country.

Oscar Wilde

Nature is a temple where living columns

Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.
Charles Baudelaire

Fear is the mind-killer.

Frank Herbert

Whatever inspiration is, it s born from a continuous I don t know.

Wislawa Szymborska

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come t
o you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometim
es a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these
stories in each other s memory.
Barry Lopez
All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deservin
g and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.
P. G. Wodehouse

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sente

nces, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a
machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
Charles Dickens

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refug
e for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural do
ubt of the authenticity of my narrative.
H. P. Lovecraft

I want you to be everything that s you, deep at the center of your being.
Confucius

Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity.

Helena P. Blavatsky

The Lord of Delphi neither speaks nor remains silent; but he speaks in symbols.
Heraclitus

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Writing is the supreme solace.

W. Somerset Maugham
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of tho
ught of others.
Marquis de Sade

Dwell in possibility.
Emily Dickinson

Books can only reveal us to ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course it rare
ly ends that way.
Kashua Ishigura

That s the essential goal of the writer: you slice out a piece of yourself and sla
p it down on the desk in front of you.
Stephen Leigh

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel,
the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
William Faulkner

One sheds one s sicknesses in books repeats and presents again one s emotions, to be
master of them.
D. H. Lawrence

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can t expect an angel to look out
.
Arthur Schoenhauer

By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing tha
t cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor imp
lies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.
Aristotle

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as
looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation o

f their own works.
John Dos Passos

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at
the cross-roads.
P. L. Travers

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity s
omehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Flannery O Connor

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Herman Melville

Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from whic
h new arts flow.
Paracelsus

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Leonardo da Vinci

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

Lao Tzu

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Anthony Trollope
Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty.
St. Francis of Assisi

People are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely i
maginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor
by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out o
f the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that
has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Myth hovers in the shadows of fairy tales.

Deena Metzger

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to s

tick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be
used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy boo
k with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
Mark Twain

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of
gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my i
magination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked w
ith azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.
Logan Pearsall Smith

It s much more important to write than to be written about.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Never save anything for your next book.
Tam Mossman

I accept Time absolutely.

Walt Whitman

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

W. Somerset Maugham

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

Benjamin Franklin

What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and before the audience guessed
what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.
E. M. Forster

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curt
is flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the e
nemy s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on who
m the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties inste
ad of overcoming them one by one: he is looking on at the suicide of his own tal
ent.
Honore de Balzac

Inside every fat book is a thin book trying to get out.

Unknown

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you ve had
a reason to do so.
Hans Hoffman

God writes a lot of comedy. Trouble is, he s stuck with so many bad actors who don t
know how to play funny.
Garrison Keillor
I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
E. B. White

The novel is an event in consciousness. The novelist is inviting readers to watc

h a performance in their own brain.
George Buchanan

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

William Wordsworth

A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better
than a fresh one that you ve scowled upon.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

We can be knowledgeable with other men s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with oth
er men s wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne

To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than
it is pleasant to them that bear it.
Elizabeth I

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of trut
h. She is positively akin to infinity.
Charles Baudelaire

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent Van Gogh

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, inde
ed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
Vita Sackville-West
The road that is walked in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than a road tro
d in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.
Marion Zimmer Bradley

I think it s bad to talk about one s present work, for it spoils something at the ro
ot of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer

An observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to those who sneer at
the use of coincidence in fiction and drama that life itself is little more tha
n a series of coincidences.
Rafael Sabatini

However great a man s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned
all at once.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Maybe, just once, someone will call me Sir without adding, You re making a scene.
Homer Simpson

If you re looking for messages, try Western Union.

Ernest Hemingway

You don t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great
.
Les Brown

If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been
waiting all along.
Joseph Campbell

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving
the best part of the mind.
William Butler Yeats

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

When you are content to be simply yourself and don t compare or compete, everybody
will respect you.
Lao Tzu

Sometimes the guide is as mysterious as the psychopomp Hermes, who leads the sou
ls of the dead into the underworld, or as formidable as Virgil, who led Dante in
to the realms of hell; sometimes she is a wondrous as the appearance of an angel
or as disturbing as the odd creature at the crossroads whom we were lucky enoug
h to befriend and thereby earned a gift the cloak of invisibility, the magic pas
sword, the sleeping potion without which we cannot cross over to or survive on t
he other side.
Deena Metzger

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity.
William Wordsworth

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people if only they d stop wr
iting.
Laura Miller

Did it happen? No. Is it true? Yes.

Ron Carlson

Men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the though
t of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the g
ulfs beyond the stars.
H. P. Lovecraft

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective

, not the truth.
Marcus Aurelius

Know the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
Herman Melville

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today.

James Joyce

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Henry David Thoreau

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and f
amiliar things new.
Samuel Johnson

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful i

n the mature than in the young.
W. Somerset Maugham

I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came in
to being. It happens because the storyteller s own experience has moved him to an
emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.
Lady Murasaki

Draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.

Michelangelo

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France
I don t take drugs, I take books.
Ingeborg Bachmann

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
Robert Heinlein

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

John D. MacDonald

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it eit
her a poison or a remedy.
Paracelsus

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.

Chinese proverb

Writers have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind s an

chorage, the soul s Great Good Place.
Wright Morris

In change things rest.

Heraclitus
If I ever get real rich, I hope I m not mean to poor people, like I am now.
Jack Handy

The Philosopher s Stone is called the most ancient, secret or unknown, natural, in
comprehensible, heavenly, blessed, sacred Stone of the Sages. It is described as
being true, more certain than certainty itself, the arcanum of all arcana the D
ivine virtue which is hidden from the foolish, the aim and end of all things und
er heaven, the wonderful epilogue or conclusion of all the labours of the Sages
the perfect essence of all the elements, the indestructible body which no elemen
t can injure, the quintessence; the double and living mercury which has in itsel
f the heavenly spirit the cure for all unsound and imperfect metals the everlast
ing light the panacea for all diseases the glorious Ph nix the most precious of tr
easures the chief good of Nature the universal triune Stone, which is naturally
composed of three things, and, nevertheless, is but one nay, is generated and br
ought forth of one, two, three, four, and five.
The Sophic Hydrolith

The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peer
s into the microscope.
Max Ernst

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he s well dressed. There ain t m
uch credit in that.
Charles Dickens

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, t
ill the Devil whispered behind the leaves It s pretty, but is it Art?
Rudyard Kipling

You cannot open a book without learning something.

Confucius

I felt a cleavage in my mind

As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
Emily Dickinson

What is the subconscious to every other person, in its creative aspect becomes,
for writers, the muse.
Ray Bradbury

Only he who can be can do.

Gurdjieff

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not re
quire his attention.
Flannery O Connor

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
Mickey Spillane

I can t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of ma
ny good films that came from very bad novels.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann

Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.

Henry James

Writing is communication, not self-expression.

Richard Peck

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come
upon the right word.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

There is in a word something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. T

o handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire

Never give a sword to a man who can t dance.

Confucius

Fundamental accuracy is the sole morality of writing.

Ezra Pound

You could tell it was classical music, because the banjo players were leaning ba
ck and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only death or a classical specal
ity can stop banjoists.
P. G. Wodehouse

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote
a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and
urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
Theodore Sturgeon

The writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader
who reads.
Dr Seuss

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the
other commands.
Marquis de Sade

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extr
emes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not see
k to interpret.
H. P. Lovecraft

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O Connor
You can t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you.
A. A. Milne

She was looking more and more like an aunt than anything human.
P. G. Wodehouse

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
Charles Dickens

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for bei
ng here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous ti
me.
Carlos Castaneda

Think no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-sellin
g novel.
Dan Bennett

God s only excuse is that he does not exist.

Stendhal

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Aldous Huxley

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.

St. Francis of Assisi

One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love my work but do not know how I write it.
Zane Grey

Common-looking people are the best in the world. That is the reason the Lord mak
es so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln

The ideas aren t that important. Really they aren t. Everyone s got an idea for a book
, a movie, a story, a TV series.
Neil Gaiman

On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.
Joyce Thompson

And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet s pen turns
them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be
the beginning.
Louis L Amour

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

William James

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.
The Necronomicon

He said true things, but called them by the wrong names.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
People can die of mere imagination.
Geoffrey Chaucer

When night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with
insolence and wine.
John Milton

Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

George Washington

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings ra
ther than illustrating.
Jackson Pollock

For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my poc
ket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
James M. Barrie

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!
Emily Dickinson

We are trying to create a world in the imagination from which to draw the kinds
of experiences we need in order to realize our possibilities.
Deena Metzger

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficientl
y to reason incorrectly.
Michel de Montaigne
Basically, fiction is people. You can t write fiction about ideas.
Theodore Sturgeon

The best way to know God is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.
Benjamin Franklin

Nature is not human-hearted.

Lao Tzu

One who has not had a good father must create one.
Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the price of experience? It is bought with the price of all a man hath,
his house, his wife, his children.
William Blake

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not
, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
James M. Barrie

To begin, begin.
William Wordsworth

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius. He who reads in a proper spir
it, can scarcely read too much.
William Godwin

Even if what you re working on doesn t go anywhere, it will help you with the next t
hing you re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot
.
Cormac McCarthy

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or sur
render yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
Confucius

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gard
ens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring s
eas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of
shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges o
f thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gat
es into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
H. P. Lovecraft

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocen
ce.
Flannery O Connor

Ideas are but approximations. To the gods, our ideas are children s toys.
Heraclitus

If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.
David Viscott

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person
.
Walt Whitman

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.

Ken MacLeod
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
Carson McCullers

The book should act as a window to the word.

Harry Duncan

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines lif
e.
William James

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!

John Milton

When you re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
Jackson Pollock

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art
are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

I feel I ve certainly been lucky to find a publisher who seems so interested gener
ally in his authors.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, throug
h how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to th
e One alone?
Hermes Trismegistus

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die
.
Leonardo da Vinci
If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is.
Henry David Thoreau

Pessimist: one who, when he has a choice between two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read
the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end.
Ernest Hemingway

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate
on a work of art.
Paul Schrader

You have to have that feeling of I ll show them. If you don t have it, don t become a wr
iter. It s part of the animal, it s primitive, but if you don t want to rise above the
crowd, forget it.
Leon Uris

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other peo
ple.
Thomas Mann

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes
us think more deeply about life.
Norbet Platt

A writer: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human f
eelings right.
John K. Hutchens

What I don t write is as important as what I write.

Jamaica Kincaid

He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak.

Louisa May Alcott

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, f
or fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in man
y parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L Amour

He lives most life whoever breathes most air.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If you are a genius, you ll make your own rules, but if not and the odds are again
st it go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the pa
per.
J. B. Priestley

I don t sing because I m happy; I m happy because I sing.

William James

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying
I may be damned.
Lord Byron

There must be room in love for hate.

Molly Peacock

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a
book.
Cicero

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that
you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsenti
mental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you.
Santha Rama Rau

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere moti
ve in scribbling at all.
Lord Byron

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see
into the life of things.
William Wordsworth

A boy s story is the best that is ever told.

Charles Dickens

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort
of history they make.
G. K. Chesterton

When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it we

re, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him.
Paracelsus

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and
speculation at a standstill.
Henry David Thoreau
Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
Camille Paglia

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Max Ernst

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
Pablo Picasso

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Those with something to fall back on invariably fall back on it. They intended to
all along. That is why they provided themselves with it.
David Mamet

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, gram
mars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to

creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
Nelson Algren

Fiction is an act of revenge.

John Hawkes

Any ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books, and thenceforward
have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Nelson Algren

To imagine yourself inside another person is what a story writer does in every p
iece of work. It is his first step, and his last too.
Eudora Welty

If you really want to hurt your parents and don t have nerve enough to be homosexu
al, the least you can do is go into the arts.
Kurt Vonnegut

Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment.

Joseph Roux

Don t mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion many beginning writers end
their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt

Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

Fyodor Dostoevsky

When a man s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be
his confusion.
Herbert Spencer

The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

Brenda Ueland

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he
lost his judgment.
Miguel de Cervantes

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat
others.
Ayn Rand

Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Aldous Huxley

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there w
ill be.
Lao Tzu

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Gore Vidal

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of tr
uthfulness. Most believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how
difficult it is.
Willa Cather

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because th
e muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.
Homer

Everything stinks till it s finished.

Dr Seuss

Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for
you to find the other three.
Confucius

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you ve understood all
your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing

I wish they would only take me as I am.

Vincent Van Gogh

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I m not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

William Zinsser

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that i
t had merely been detected.
Oscar Wilde

Everything that suffers is sensible; everything that is sensible, suffereth.

The Divine Pymander

I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forwa
rd.
Thomas Edison

Without a gentle contempt for education, no man s education is complete.

G. K. Chesterton

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermis
t.
Camille Paglia

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is beauti
ful , especially if dissociated from its sense and spelling. More beautiful than,
say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.
J.R.R. Tolkien

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Charles Dickens

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Benjamin Franklin

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man s character, giv
e him power.
Abraham Lincoln

The novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to
it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, lik
e modern tombstones, or the Punch and Judy show.
George Orwell

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don t know why they choose him and he s
usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner

Who are you going to believe me, or your own eyes?

Groucho Marx

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle
; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat.
Henry Ward Beecher

No time for poetry but exactly what is.

Jack Kerouac

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Willa Cather
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were
unimaginative, would take you only a minute.
Franklin P. Adams

Any story takes place in the landscape of the imagination.

Stef Penney

Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
John Campbell

To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a
single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.
Mark Twain

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading
them. The great charm of all power is modesty.
Louisa May Alcott

There s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tuck
ed in for the night, and that s a writer sitting down to write.
Mignon McLaughlin

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

William James

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal

The naming of what is there is what is important.

Ian McEwan
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
James M. Barrie

The Principle of Rhythm embodies this truth: that in everything there is manifes
ted a measured motion; a to-and-from movement; a flow and inflow; a swing forwar
d and backward; a pendulum-like movement between opposing energies.
The Kybalion

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unth
inking.
John Maynard Keynes

To feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange l
andmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships o
f perception, making new and unheard-of effects with words. That is writing as I
feel it, a kind of significant living.
Richard Wright

It is not inspiration; it is expiration.

Jean Cocteau

Close the door.

Barbara Kingsolver

Plausibility is the morality of fiction.

Edith Mirrilees

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

Herbert Spencer

I don t like work, but I like what is in the work the chance to find yourself.
Joseph Conrad
Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every othe
r impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater becaus
e I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace
; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and
abhorrent.
H. P. Lovecraft

The object of art is to give life a shape.

William Shakespeare

America is essentially a woman s country why shouldn t the leading novelists be wome
n?
Henry Miller

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to wal
ls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the
lover to the love he has forsaken.
Thomas Wolfe

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Nadine Gordimer

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

William E. Gladstone

When we sit down each day and do our work. The Muse takes note of our dedication
. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. we become like a magnetized r
od that attracts iron filings.
Steven Pressfield

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

God has entrusted me with myself.

Epictetus

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books
.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be
published at all.
Aleister Crowley

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare

Every man is the son of his own works.

Miguel de Cervantes

When I think about all the crap I learned in high school it s a wonder I can think
at all.
Paul Simon

The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

P. G. Wodehouse

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.
Louis L Amour

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

William Blake
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the
originality.
Beatrix Potter

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living t

hought and may vary greatly in color and content.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader re
ads one is to remember it.
Tom Wolfe

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her f
ace. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due
she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
E. M. Forster

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

Theodore Dreiser

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W. C. Fields

To be energetic and authentic, a national literature includes dialogues with the

despised. Equally, our own writing wants to be infused with the dark light from
our underworlds.
Deena Metzger

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must
awaken.
Frank Herbert
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, t
hen he who continues the attack wins.
Ulysses S. Grant

Once you got Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once yo
u thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
Andy Warhol

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. D
o not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The w
orld will present itself to you for its unmasking. It can do no other. In ecstas
y it will writhe at your feet.
Franz Kafka

I write to escape; to escape poverty.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The imagination needs moodling long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and put
tering.
Brenda Ueland

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but on

e special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the film
iest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
William James

Do what you can with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt

It is easy to finish things. Nothing is simpler. Never does one lie so cleverly
as then.
Toulouse Lautrec
We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our p
assion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James

I m not funny. What I am is brave.

Lucille Ball

He who is only just is cruel.

Lord Byron

A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter s day. In order to keep fr

om freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to
huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to st
op the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and begin to sh
iver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as the
y struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.
Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us not make arbitrary conjectures about the greatest matters.

Heraclitus

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is more than living, for it is bei
ng conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
James M. Barrie

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just f
alls back into her and is swallowed up.
Camille Paglia
The more particular, the more specific you are, the more universal you are.
Nancy Hale

I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of
a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult.
E. B. White

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and dance
d all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
Aleister Crowley

My aim is to put down what I see in the best and simplest way.
Ernest Hemingway

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Epictetus

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years
mere study of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,

And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
Lord Byron

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always car
ry a small snake.
W. C. Fields

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indiffere
nt to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is seeing something that isn t
there.
Thomas Hardy

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as
far as it was possible for a man to go.
Joseph Conrad

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Alice Munro

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T. S. Eliot

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials,
but it s the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula Le Guin

Don t say the old lady screamed bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author s private thoughts a
nd meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would be
come interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray

Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circu
mstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, gift
edness, or skill.
W. C. Fields

Why don t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I m a holy man minus the holiness.

E. M. Forster

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actu
ally read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to wr
ite in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think t
hat you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel
. I think for most people it s just practice, practice, practice, that sense of ju
st learning your instrument until when you have an idea on the violin, you don t h
ave to translate it into violin-speak anymore the language is your own. It s not s
omething you can think your way into, or outsmart. you ve just got to do it.
Kevin Canty

When I m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
Anne Rice

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin.

Kahlil Gibran

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling and good ex
pression; it is having wit, soul and taste, all together.
George-Louis Leclerc

Nothing can come of nothing.

William Shakespeare
The bones connected by joints are at once one and several. To agree is to differ
, the harmony is the discord. From the particulars come oneness, from oneness th
e particulars.
Heraclitus

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead t
hrough neat critical gardens, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of
craft.
Jessamyn West

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Epictetus

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most
important.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Bet
ter make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dea

ling with men.
Joseph Conrad

Not every man can see the truth, but he can be it.
Franz Kafka

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. Childre
n you only need to tell things to once.
Diana Wynne Jones
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can t touch.
E. M. Forster

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man s li
fe sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The writer s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible fo
r the reader to discern what he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

God gave us memory so we might have roses in December.

James M. Barrie

I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Van Gogh

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them
thinks himself the greatest in the world.
Miguel De Cervantes

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

William James

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things. It s all a big game of co
nstruction some with a brush some with a shovel some choose a pen.
Jackson Pollock

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I

simply skip what should be the beginning.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Your writing is trying to tell you something.
Joanne Greenberg

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley

The virtue of books is to be readable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No matter what the subject, the subject is always love.

Ingrid Bengis

Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.

Lewis Carroll

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure
.
Jane Austen

They said this mystery never shall cease:

The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.
William Blake

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Herman Hesse

To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable
of it.
Leo Tolstoy

If a person feels he can t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
Tom Lehrer

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

E. M. Forster

Love is life s reward, rewarded in rewarding.

Herbert Spencer

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a g
ood line.
Theodore Roethke

Bring my goat.
Porgy

Words derive their power from the original word.

Meister Eckhart

Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we cons
ider a book, we mustn t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
Umberto Eco

Many that live deserve death and many that die deserve life. Can you give it to
them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement, for even the very
wise cannot see all ends.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Don Quixote s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Franz Kafka
Carpe per diem seize the check.
Robin Williams

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The energy of divine fire shines forth voluntarily and in common, and being self
-invoked and self-energetic, energizes through all things with invariable samene
ss, both through the natures which impart and those that are able to receive its
light. This mode of solution, therefore, is far superior, which does not suppos
e that divine works are effected through contrariety, or discrepance, in the way
in which generated natures are usually produced; but asserts that every such wo
rk is rightly accomplished through sameness, union, and consent.
Iamblichus On The Mysteries

The poet shall shall know that the ground is always ready-ploughed and manured.
Others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His t
rust shall master the trust of everything he touches and shall master all attach
ment.
Walt Whitman

Practice doesn t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Vince Lombardi

Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; the
refore it is dumb.
Umberto Eco

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

William Makepeace Thackeray

If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you ca
n go.
James Baldwin
Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.
William Shakespeare

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

Lord Byron

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in
the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sen
se.
Joseph Conrad

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close
relationships.
Andy Warhol

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.

Unknown

Art, it seems to me, should simplify, so that all that one has suppressed and cu
t away is there to the reader s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the
page.
Willa Cather

I left nearly all my business to an agent. I am still encumbered with his sloven
ly and disadvantageous agreements.
H. G. Wells

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen
, to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn t advance the sto
ry.
Frank Yerby

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better
to endure it.
Samuel Johnson

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a voi
d, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can g
ive form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substanc
e itself.
Mary Shelley

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its ro
ots into the very depth of your heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In the middle of my life s walk

I found myself in a dark wood,
For the straight road was lost.
Dante Alighieri

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It s literary suicide.

Erma Bombeck

Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effe
ct. Both deny the infinite.
Frank Herbert

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

E. M. Forster

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.
William E. Gladstone
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they ha
ve never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
Vincent Van Gogh

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject h
e may.
Walter Savage Landor

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not
the expression of personality but an escape from personality.
T. S. Eliot

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men s judgments of one another.

Erasmus

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound phil
osopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
Peter Carey

Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been di
scovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason.
Samuel Butler

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and b
y regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we
can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James

Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.
Paracelsus
My painting does not come from the easel.
Jackson Pollock

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Oscar Wilde

The writer s intention hasn t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to ea
rn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn t matter in th
e end. Just what comes out.
Lillian Hellman

I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.

Ernest Hemingway

There is no try. There is only do or do not.

Yoda

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The wor
st thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt

It s under Edit.
Claire Born

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Meister Eckhart

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust f
ulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills"
that human beings are capable of.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A writer without sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable a
s a writer.
Joseph Conrad

Dare and the world yields.

William Makepeace Thackeray

It ain t what they call you, it s what you answer to.

W. C. Fields

One of the things that happens to careers out here is that people destroy themse
lves because they begin to think they re wonderful. They begin to think they know
what they re doing, and the minute that happens, it s over.
William Goldman

Jests that give pain are no jests.

Miguel de Cervantes

Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive.
Ayn Rand

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

Herman Melville

Thunderbolt is at the helm.

Heraclitus

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Benjamin Franklin

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. T
he soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control
than the economic variety.
Trevor Nunn

Somewhere in his journals Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere,
at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig aw
ay long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Saul Bellow

Sure, it s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. LeGuin

From two waters make one, whereby seek to make the sun and moon. Prepare to drin
k the wine of the antagonists. And you shall see with the Dead. Thereupon, make
watery earth. And multiply the stone.
The Splendor Solis

Be a fool on the page. Step off the cliff.

Deena Metzger

Talent can t be taught, but it can be awakened.

Wallace Stegner

I paint things as they are. I don t comment.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his lif
e by altering his attitude.
William James

Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gymbal in the wabe:
All mimsey were the borogroves,
And the momes rath outgrabe.
Lewis Carrol

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that wil
l endure as long as life lasts.
Rachel Carson

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

Geoffrey Chaucer

I don t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

J. D. Salinger

You re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn t lose it.
Robin Williams

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

Lord Byron

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a c
ollective dignity.
E. M. Forster

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Nadine Gordimer

The world nourishes bodies, the spirit nourishes souls.

Hermes Trismegistus
In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
Miguel de Cervantes

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

Camille Paglia

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it
would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.
W. Somerset Maugham

Really to pray, one must want nothing.

Meister Eckhart

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

August Wilson

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

W. C. Fields

If a man has talent and can t use it, he s failed. If he uses only half of it, he ha
s partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfa
ction and triumph few men ever know.
Thomas Wolfe

Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.
Louisa May Alcott

Belief creates the actual fact.

William James
When I am in my painting, I m not aware of what I m doing.
Jackson Pollock

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Oscar Wilde

You contain enough, why don t you let it out then?

Walt Whitman

By a route obscure and lonely,

Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon named Night
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space out of Time.
Edgar Allen Poe

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the li
ving.
T. S. Eliot

I m not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books woul
d help.
A. N. Wilson

Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.
Mike Rich
Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of wh
at you are going to say.
Francoise Sagan

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutiona
ry spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right
, for nothing has yet happened.
Franz Kafka

The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Aleister Crowley

If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.

Colin Greenland

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
Epictetus

Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in
the next work without thinking about it.
Romulus Linney

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, the

re would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Of course one should not drink much, but often.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.
Jack London
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, w
hen you criticize them, you re a mile away and you have their shoes.
Jack Handy

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel
the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of sho
re birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold
thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to th
e sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly
life can be.
Rachel Carson

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any othe
r person can be.
Jane Austen

The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; could we rightl
y comprehend the mind of man nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth.
Paracelcus

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Anita Brookner

Gentiles are people who eat mayonnaise for no reason.

Robin Williams

I try to work every day, even when I m not motivated.

Mel Ramos

The main question to a novel is did it amuse? It is only meant to please; and it
must do that or it does nothing.
Sydney Smith

If I were a girl, I should be still in my first innocence. If I were a woman, I

should always be giving birth in my soul to the eternal word. If I were a husban
d, I should put up a stiff resistance to all evil. If I were a wife, I should ke
ep faith with my dear one, whom I married. If I were a widow, I should be always
longing for the one I loved. If I were a virgin, I should be reverently devout.
If I were a servant maid, in humility I should count myself lower than God or a
ny creature; and if I were a manservant, I should be hard at work, always servin
g my Lord with my whole heart. But since of all these I am neither one, I am jus
t a something among somethings, and so I go.
Meister Eckhart

I don t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn t true.

Dorothy Parker

Tap into what you don t want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony
, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.
Arthur Penn

None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I ll fa
il to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done.
Nancy Mairs

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

Arthur Conan Doyle

To forget one s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear, and devils, too.
Graycie Harmon

The more you say, the less people remember.

Francois Fenelon
You know how it is in the kid s book world; it s just bunny eat bunny.
Unknown

In any art form, generalities are useless.

Zubin Mehta

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to.
Jane Rule

There are two kinds of sacrifices: the ordinary kind, and those performed by men
who have first purified themselves.
Heraclitus

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Oscar Wilde

Scientific people are always curious, and I am going to be scientific. I keep sa

ying to myself: What is it? What is it? It s something. It can t be nothing! I don t k
now its name, so I call it Magic. I have never seen the sun rise, but Mary and D
ickon have, and from what they tell me I am sure that is Magic too. Something pu
shes it up and draws it. Sometimes since I ve been in the garden I ve looked up thro
ugh the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if s
omething were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic
is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is ma
de out of Magic: leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squi
rrels and people. So it must be all around us.
Frances Hodgson Burnett

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Ivana Trump

Art can t hurt you.

Fred Babb
Whenever you read a good book, it s like the author is right there, in the room ta
lking to you, which is why I don t like to read good books.
Jack Handy

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
H. P. Lovecraft

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.

Joseph Conrad

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant
does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who wor
k with him. Don t knock your friends. Don t knock your enemies. Don t knock yourself.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The structure of myth exists in the mind and needs only be tapped.
Deena Metzger

So have I, said the stranger, a strong poetic turn. Epic poem ten thousand lines re
volution of July composed it on the spot Mars by day, Apollo by night bang the f
ield-piece, twang the lyre.
Charles Dickens

Adversity is the first path to truth.

Lord Byron

Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There s nothing like having a midg
et for a butler.
W. C. Fields
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka

All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery a confidence trick, trying to
make people believe something is true.
Angus Wilson

Life always spills over the rim of every cup.

Boris Pasternak

One who is caught in thought loses his original nature. All he knows are words a
nd descriptions. When he sees the actual thing, he fails to perceive it.
Dalai Lama

I write because I like to write.

Paddy Chayefsky

The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have m
ade safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it
up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don t know the poetry writ
ten in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It woul
d be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to app
reciate them.
Robert Frost

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
Dorothy Parker
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is the
re not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
Jane Austen

One cannot violate the promptings of one s nature without having that nature recoi
l upon itself.
Jack London

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William James

I m youth, I m joy, I m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
James M. Barrie

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

Vincent Van Gogh

The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not t
o be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the tr
ees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken someth
ing within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.
Anthony de Mello

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

In the world of words imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens
It s funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and never
realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating.
Jack Handy

This is where I begin to live my life, knowing that nothing matters, nothing eve
r matters like the love you receive and the love you give.
Bernice Ellis

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

Sir Winston Churchill

For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear
a diadem.
Bishop Berkeley

Any fool can make a rule. And every fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
Thomas Hardy

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I th
ink I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I d like to be.
E. M. Forster

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

William Shakespeare

That s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Alice Munro

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make
the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
P. G. Wodehouse

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Walt Whitman

If you would have a faithful servant, and one that you like, serve yourself.
Benjamin Franklin

He who worships a punishing God becomes a surrogate punisher.

Hermaptios

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the o
nes who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and
strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of
their work, despite the difficulties.
Bonnie Friedman

And as to experience well, think how little some good poets have had, or how muc
h some bad ones have.
Elizabeth Bishop

There are men that will make you books and turn them loose into the world with a
s much dispatch as they would a dish of fritters.
Miguel de Cervantes

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round a
nd solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and
the cause is half won.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
Confucius

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.
Mark Twain

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all t
he centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.
Friedrich Nietzsche

For the cat is cryptic, and close to Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotte
n cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle s lords, and heir to the se
crets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her
language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she h
ath forgotten.
H. P. Lovecraft

Beware of the need to be literal, for this often shrouds deeper knowledge.
Deena Metzger

The knower and the known are one.

Meister Eckhart

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The great art of life is sensation: to feel that we exist, even in pain.
Lord Byron

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Joseph Conrad
The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.
Epictetus

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Gertrude Stein

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or paint

ing a picture, by simply molding one s inner life. And that too is a deed.
Etty Hillesum

Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make
your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.
Leonardo da Vinci

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in va
in.
Carl Jung

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth have not any subsistence without
a mind.
Bishop Berkeley

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that
will really throw you into a panic.
Jack Handy

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.

Meister Eckhart

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Miguel de Cervantes

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

Thomas Wolf

When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader fee
l pity, try to be somewhat colder that seems to give a kind of background to ano
ther s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the
characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. The more objective you are, the
stronger will be the impression you make.
Anton Chekhov

I write to find out what I m thinking about.

Edward Albee

The brotherhood of man is no mere poet s fancy; it is a most depressing and humili
ating reality.
Oscar Wilde

An onion can make people cry, but there s never been a vegetable that can make peo
ple laugh.
Will Rogers

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between righ
t and wrong.
Carl Jung

Teatime trying to write God! I have a brain like a peanut. Found a peanut, found
a peanut, echoes in my head the insane song.
John Dos Passos
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
Robert Oppenheimer

Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards
.
W. H. Auden

A writer s inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.
Pierre Beaumarchais

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

Ayn Rand

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the tru
th, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselv
es from our insane passion for the truth.
Umberto Eco

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simp

licity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.

Samuel Johnson

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Benjamin Disraeli

People fear the unkown; what they should fear is the known.
Deepak Chopra

The least of things with meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of thin
gs without it.
Carl Jung

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my so
ul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance
upon the shore.
Kahlil Gibran

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him
or her that when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate
syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the ey
es wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Raymond Chandler

What we don t know, rather than what we know, can be the very core of story.
Deena Metzger

The most beautiful thing about capitalism is the incompetence of dishonesty.

John Wall

Our free will is fate.

Oswald Spengler

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be h

opelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana

Without darkness, there is no dream.

John Ruskin
Good writers are almost never dangerous.
John Gardner

Writing is not a genteel profession; it s quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
Rosemary Mahoney

Flowers wither not the Spring;

Fathers perish not their love.
Spirit gambols in the flesh
Until what s mortal cannot dance.
All that s good in you shall live,
Survives the falling of the mask,
And if God asks me who you are,
I ll say that part that did not die.
W. Hamnet Wall

I am not very scrupulous, I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into posses
sion of it.
Lord Byron

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the poi
nt that must be reached.
Franz Kafka

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several
days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
W. C. Fields

To make dictionaries is dull work.

Samuel Johnson

You ve really got to start hitting the books because it s no joke out here.
Harper Lee

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ours
elves.
William Haxlitt

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Pittacus

Conscience makes egoists of us all.

Oscar Wilde

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes.
Proust

Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lu
cky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.
Jack Handy

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celeb
rate writing.
Melinda Haynes

Remember, a word is an invention, a symbol for an idea. Written text began as an

artistic representation of a thought or event.
Edward J. Fraughton

At the root of our lives is a question, a series of questions, a quest, some fun
damental concerns or obsessions; the mystery, the story, and the meaning of our
lives reside there. A story also has a question at the core of it, and the quest
ion leads to the mystery within the story. The deeper one goes into the story, t
he more one learns, the more things are revealed, the deeper the mystery. Perhap
s the story has no other function than to ask this question or to deepen the mys
tery.
Deena Metzger

Those blessings that I have to give, I give you freely, and those I do not have
to give, you are seeking on your own.
Seth

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. Forster

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and trava
il.
Theodore Dreiser

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The wheel is come full circle.

William Shakespeare

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Nadine Gordimer

I always write with a Ticonderoga #2 pencil. I started out with it, and I ll go to
that Great Bookstore in the Sky with one of those in my hand.
Robert Ludlum

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters
in the end.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Here s to alcohol, the cause of and solution to all life s problems.

Homer Simpson
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to t
he regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the
daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber

Life is the childhood of immortality.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Democrats never agree on anything, that s why they re Democrats. If they agreed with
each other, they would be Republicans.
Will Rogers

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Carl Jung

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poe

m points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it s the only way you can do anythin
g really good.
William Faulkner

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Voltaire

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process
of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting tim
e.
Deborah Eisenberg
Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
Marquis de Sade

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

John Barth

There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

It s sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild
dogs.
Jack Handy

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his o
wn face.
William Makepeace Thackeray

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but
man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Joseph Conrad

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of ha
bits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Buckminster Fuller

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comi
c strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Fai
thful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself wel
l, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping aro
und in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they esc
ape.
Ray Bradbury

It s hard to be aggressive when you re confused.

Vince Lombardi

Dogs are philosophers. They soon forget.

P. G. Wodehouse

There is no substitute for craft. Art begins with craft, and there is no art unt
il craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
Simone Weil

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful sti
rrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
Herman Melville

To Zeus all things are good, fair and just.

Heraclitus

My work is about emotions for which I have no words.

Robert Sturman

Nothing is easier than saying words. Nothing is harder than living them day afte
r day.
Arthur Gordon
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separatio
n or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing
aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation.
But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathologi
cal.
Anthony Storr

When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.
Meister Eckhart

When in doubt, go for the dick joke.

Robin Williams

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could
die of it.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Jorge Luis Borges

The writer s genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into
a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer s only stuff for
sale.
James Gunn

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable busi
ness.
John Steinbeck

Be thankful we re not getting all the government we re paying for.

Will Rogers

The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty, but
in no time you d be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more a
nd more beautiful reductions became possible.
Edward Blishen

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Goethe

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

Horace

Take one part Mercurii Solis, the preparation of which I have already taught in
another place by its proper process. Draw off its airy water so that it becomes
a subtle dust and calx. Then take two parts of our blessed oil, and pour the oil
very slowly, drop by drop onto the dust of the Mercurii Solis, until everything
has become absorbed. Put it in a vial, well sealed, into a heat of the first de
gree of the oven of secrets, and let it remain there for ten days and nights. Yo
u will then see your powder and oil quite dry, such that it has become a single
piece of dust of a blackish grey colour. After ten days give it the second degre
e of heat, and the grey and black colour will slowly change into a whiteness so
that it becomes more or less white. And at the end of these ten days, the matter
will take on a beautiful rose white. But this may be ignored. For this colour i
s only due to the Mercurio Solis, that has swallowed up our blessed oil, and now
covers it with the innermost part of its body. But by the power of the fire, ou
r oil will again subdue such Mercurium Solis, and throw it into its innermost. A
nd the oil with its very bright red colour will rule over it and remain on the o
utside. Therefore it is time, when twenty days have passed, that you open the wi
ndow of the third degree. The external white colour and force will then complete
ly recede inwardly, and the internal red colour will, by the force of the fire,
become external. Keep also this degree of fire for ten days, without increase or
decrease. You will then see your powder, that was previously white, now become
very red. But for the time being this redness may be ignored, for it is still un
fixed and volatile; and at the end of these ten days, when the thirtieth day has
passed, you should open the last window of the fourth degree of fire, Let it st
ay in this degree for another ten days, and this very bright red powder will beg
in to melt. Let it stay in flux for these ten days. And when you take it out you
will find on the bottom a very bright red and transparent stone, ruby colored.
Roger Bacon
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E. B. White

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds?

Ray Bradbury

I still read everything aloud. I have a fundamental conviction that if a sentenc

e cannot be read aloud with sincerity, conviction, and communicable emphasis, it s
not a good sentence. Good writing requires good rhythms and good words.
Richard Marius

A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remo
test centuries.
Bishop Berkeley

Life isn t fair. It s just fairer than death, that s all.

William Goldman

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it s about, but the music the
words make.
Truman Capote

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wic
kedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Jung

i do not put Collers what do not Belong. I Think it spoils The pictures. There h
ave Been a lot of paintins spoiled By putin Collers where They do not Blong.
Alfred Wallis

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormen
ting a respectable man.
Jane Austen

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the chris
tening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be
a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
Rachel Carson

Shouldn t the philosopher be able to rise above a faith in grammar?

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we
had never married at all.
Lord Byron

Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The p
oorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratc
h with every new book.
Raymond Chandler

I finished my play today. Three acts, six scenes, a masterpiece completed in a f

ew weeks. The play only exists as a tiny scrawl in my notebooks things I carry a
bout in my pockets.
George Bernard Shaw

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather

I am not young enough to know everything.

James M. Barrie

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to list

en to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
T. S. Eliot

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned in

to.
Jonathan Swift

The one thing that don t abide by majority rule is a person s conscience.
Harper Lee

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and sou
ndest.
Henry David Thoreau

There s the wretched business of getting from lunch to supper.

Virginia Woolf

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimensio

n, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hat
e, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called manki
nd, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have hu
man qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, but when we cross t
he line to the boundless and hideous unknown the shadow-haunted Outside we must
remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.
H. P. Lovecraft

Writing only leads to more writing.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely
right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as
spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Mark Twain
Ignorance is like a delicate flower: touch it and the bloom is gone.
Oscar Wilde

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

Ernest Hemingway

Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substa
nce.
Stanley Schmidt

A prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised.

Machiavelli

Too many words spoil the poem.

John McEnulty

Only the educated are free.

Epictetus

As vast as this space without is the tiny space within your heart: heaven and ea
rth are found in it, fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and the constellation
s, whatever belongs to you here below and all that doesn t, all this is gathered i
n the tiny space within your heart.
Chandogya Upanishad

A text cannot say everything. It can only go as far as all words can go. Beyond
them begins another zone, a zone of mystery, of silence, which one calls the atm
osphere.
Gaston Baty

I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you wan

t to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then n
o matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to
tie it together.
Tad Williams

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy, the process of setting

man free from men.
Ayn Rand

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see
us once beautiful and brave.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Consider the daffodil. And while you re doing that, I ll be over here, looking throu
gh your stuff.
Jack Handy

Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of our

selves.
Carl Jung

Do the best you can, and don t take life too serious.
Will Rogers

In the dark time, the eye begins to see.

Theodore Roethke

I write, therefore, I am.

Samuel Johnson

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Robert Southey
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
Oscar Wilde

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

E. M. Forster

From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Frank Herbert

The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Lord Byron

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.

Dr Seuss

If there are frontiers between the civilized and barbaric, between the meaningfu
l and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the ear
th. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.

C. Astrid Weber

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be intere
sting.
Henry James

Prose wanders around with a lantern and laboriously schedules and verifies the d
etails and particulars of a valley and its frame of crags and peaks, then poetry
comes and lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
Mark Twain

The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Carl Jung

We are alike in pickiness but not in the subject matter we are picking about.
Rhonda Burtz

The ego is the enemy because it is against love. When I look at myself, I don t lo
ve others. When I want to occupy for myself what is yours, I become the killer o
f my brother, like Cain killed Abel. When I want to satisfy myself, this satisfa
ction is gained through sacrificing the freedom of the other. Then my ego become
s my lord, my god, and there is no stronger temptation than this. Because to us,
this ego may seem like a diamond. It has a shine like gold. But whatever is shi
ning is not gold. The ego is just like a fire without light, a fire without warm
th, a fire without life. It seems that it has many sides and many possibilities
but what is this possibility? What is ego? Only the means by which I protect mys
elf as if I were in a battle, as if every other person is my enemy, and the only
thing I care about is winning the victory.
Archimandrite Dionysios

Greatness means going on, going on means going far, and going far means turning
back.
Lao Tzu

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.

Henry David Thoreau

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can sto
p it.
Ernest Hemingway
Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.
La Rouchefaucauld

Live dangerously and you live right.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Make a point ever so clear, it is great odds that any man whose habits and the b
ent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak
a thing is reason in competition with inclination.
Bishop Berkeley

When I say beautiful things, I m not necessarily living them; when I live them, th
e beautiful thing is that words aren t necessary.
Brock Tully

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I ju

st want to write.
P. G. Wodehouse

Everyone has one good poem in his hidden head.

Don Welch

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson

I suppose publishers are untrustworthy. They certainly look it.

Oscar Wilde

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
Meister Eckhart
The praise that comes from love does not make us vain, but more humble.
James M. Barrie

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

Marcus Aurelius

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

Walt Whitman

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance
to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert

I am a verb.
Ulysses S. Grant

I believe I hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live
in folly, illusion, deception, and ignorance, but it isn t it s human.
Erasmus

It is impossible to discourage the real writers they don t give a damn what you sa
y, they re going to write.
Sinclair Lewis

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes,
your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
Agatha Christie

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble
. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung

Art is utterance.
Asterio Tecson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand w
ell.
Jack London

A fool and his money are soon elected.

Will Rogers

The arts are not decorative. They are essential to our comprehension of consciou
sness and ourselves.
Edward Albee

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.

Jack Woodford

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Those who think to win the world

by doing something to it,
I see them come to grief.
For the world is a sacred object.
Nothing is to be done to it.
To do anything is to damage it.
To seize it is to lose it.
Lao Tzu

He suffered occasionally from a rush of words to the head.

Herbert Samuel
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman

God: a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man s power to conceive.
Ayn Rand

He reproduced himself with humble objectivity, with the unquestioning matter-of-

fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there s another do
g.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Charles Dickens

I too love theories. They are so much more concrete than reality.
P. Q. Wall

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make yo
u wonder.
Brian Aldiss

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
Jean-Paul Sartre

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a stor
y to live by. Religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main
ways of meeting this abiding need.
Harvey Cox

Happiness is your birthright. It shouldn t depend upon you achieving something.

Steve Chandler
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils
, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother,
then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. I would
venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was o
ften a woman.
Virginia Woolf

It is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect, I fe
el certain. But just because of this, it isn t getting on. It s a series of well-tur
ned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to un
screw them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wan
ts the sail to take more wind.
Gustave Flaubert

When you see the same thing over and over again your brain expends less and less
energy. Your mind already knows what it s seeing, so it doesn t make the effort to
process the event again.
Dr. Gregory Berns

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

Samuel Butler

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To create something you must be something.

Goethe

I once had a rose named after me and was very flattered. But I was not so please
d to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against
 a wall.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Just because you re a perfectionist doesn t mean you re perfect.

Jack Nicholson

How can the lord of ten thousand chariots let his own person weigh less in the b
alance than his land?
Lao Tzu

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to
be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a
mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesse
s. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a s
carlet thread.
Oscar Wilde

If you could be freed from self, then you would have the nature of the highest a
ngels as completely as you now have your own.
Meister Eckhart

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and conc
ealed.
Kahlil Gibran

The two most beautiful words in the English language are Check Enclosed.
Dorothy Parker

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed shrink is o

ur friend.
Jack Handy

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Why wouldn t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yo
urself? It s far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head, and as you get older y
ou become more skillful casting them.
Gore Vidal

I have just read your lousy review. You sound like a frustrated old man who neve
r made a success, an eight ulcer man on a four ulcer job. I have never met you b
ut if I do, you ll need a new nose.
Harry S. Truman

Your work is to discover your world and then with your all your heart give yours
elf to it.
Buddha

My crown is called content; a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.

William Shakespeare

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
Robert Frost

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horiz
on s verge.
Lord Byron

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one s own emotions.

E. M. Forster

The bible says to love your enemies. Just for practice, why don t you try it out o
n your friends?
Will Rogers
If the public likes you, you re good.
Mickey Spillane

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Charles Baudelaire

Andy Warhol is the only genius I ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
Gore Vidal

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and steri
le.
Sinclair Lewis

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Edward Albee

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not l
augh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Kahlil Gibran

One s feelings waste themselves in words. They ought all to be distilled into acti
ons and into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale

Earth s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who
sees takes off his shoes.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account o
f that which conceals it.
Paracelcus

Go to your bosom: knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
William Shakespeare

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire

Overcome fear, behold wonder.

Richard Bach

However great a man s natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned
all at once.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the pl
ay instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object
s it loves.
Carl Jung

When an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you ans
wer it.
Eric Maisel

The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.
Meister Eckhart

Never underestimate something born in a manger.

Katrina Kern
The wound is the resource.
Brugh Joy

I have to use words to say it. Words that violate and betray what they seem to b
e making possible. Words, in other words, that are sadly not to be trusted.
Selima Hill

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

Oscar Wilde

Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we
call a man cold, when he is only sad.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In argument, similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothi
ng.
Franz Kafka

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

Bishop Berkeley

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Jane Austen

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies
away without the sympathy of the community.
William James

Perfect Bodies as Sol and Luna are endued with a perfect seed; and therefore und
er the hard crust of the perfect Metals the Perfect Seed lies hid. And he that k
nows how to take it out by the Philosophers Solution, hath entered upon the royal
highway; for in Gold the seeds of Gold doth lie, though buried in Obscurity.
The Hermetic Arcanum
There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
James M. Barrie

Whatever becomes of the work, the occupation of writing has been a real boon to
me. It took me out of dark and desolate reality into an unreal but happier regio
n.
Charlotte Bronte

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myse
lf.
Tom Stoppard

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than wha
t happens.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Loss is nothing but change, and change is Nature s delight.

Marcus Aurelius

That s very nice if they want to publish you, but don t pay too much attention to it
. Just continue to write.
Natalie Goldberg

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man wou
ld have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find
it, will never become a great writer.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

Erasmus

Never assume the obvious is true.

William Safire
I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.
Ken Wilber

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Charles Baudelaire

A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.

Gore Vidal

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as i
t will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than
immediately understand.
Edward Albee

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
Kahlil Gibran

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

Will Rogers

You don t talk about paintings, you look at them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

Wolcott Gibbs

It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
Jack Handy

I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual.

Lord Byron

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
Epictetus

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of you
th s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted it from more and more, and floa
t upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
John Updike

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or
a very short creed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The desire to write grows with writing.

Erasmus

The writer who cares more about words than about story characters, action, setti
ng, atmosphere is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream.
John Gardner

To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
Sri Aurobindo

Some days I m a particle, some days I m a wave.

David Kern

Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.

Heraclitus
It s nothing until I call it.
The Umpire

The artist s only responsibility is his art. If a writer has to rob his mother, he
will not hesitate. Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner

Beware of self-indulgence. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you
already have enough ego.
David Brin

Jade is praised as precious, but its strength is being stone.

Lao Tzu

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don t know and I don t care
.
William Safire

Winter is not a season, it s an occupation.

Sinclair Lewis

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Gore Vidal

Sweet are the uses of adversity.

William Shakespeare

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Kahlil Gibran

The Vessel of Hermes which the Stoicks have concealed is not a Necromantical Ves
sel, but it is the Measure of your Fire.
Mary the Prophetess

It s no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some
way, reward the righteous.
John Updike

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we t
hen to depreciate imagination?
Carl Jung

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.
Benjamin Disraeli

You really ought to read more books you know, those things that look like blocks
but come apart on one side.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every book should have its own voice what you hear in your head as you read to y
ourself.
Mary Lee Settle

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
Marcel Marceau

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

William Shakespeare

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

Grace is not a stationary thing; it is always found in a Becoming.

Meister Eckhart

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

James Joyce

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty o
f a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.
Oscar Wilde

A man s most open actions have a secret side to them.

Joseph Conrad

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.

William James

Hence Hermes calls fire the father of the whole world, because it is the Sun of
our Art, and air, Moon, and water ascend from it. The earth is the nurse of the
Stone. When the earth receives the rays of the Sun and Moon, a new body is born,
like a new foetus in the mother s womb. The earth receives and digests the light
of Sun and Moon, and imparts food to its foetus day by day, till it becomes grea
t and strong, and puts off its blackness and defilement, and is changed to a dif
ferent colour. This, child, which is called our daughter, represents our Stone,
which is born anew of the Sun and Moon, when the spirit, or the water that ascen
ded, is gradually transmuted into the body, and the body is born anew, and grows
and increases in size like the foetus in the mother s womb. Thus the Stone is gen
erated from the first substance, which contains the four elements; it is brought
forth by two things, the body and the spirit; the wind bears it in its womb, fo
r it carries the Stone upward from earth to heaven, and down again from heaven t
o earth. Thus the Stone receives increase from above and from below, and is born
a second time, just as every other foetus is generated in the maternal womb; as
all created things bring forth their young, even so does the air, or wind, brin
g forth our Stone.
Unknown

Where words fail, music speaks.

Hans Christian Andersen
There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face rea
lity; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he c
annot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
Maurice Blanchot

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake
up somebody.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and at
testing her eternity.
Herman Melville

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them togeth
er, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose a
nd particular skill.
Edmund Morrison

Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
Benjamin Disraeli

I can t stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like,
Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me? or Do you have that 50 buc
ks you borrowed? Man, quit being so cheap!
Jack Handy

Words make love with one another.

Andre Breton

There is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel
: great storytelling.
Donald Maass

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its u
ltimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the convi
ction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper
.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Art is the poetry of how we all might live, and economics the prose of how we do
.
James Wall Sr.

It is harder to hide feelings we have than to feign those we lack.

La Rouchefaucauld

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learnin
g.
Benjamin Disraeli

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight
in other people s patience.
John Updike

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven t committed
.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The water and the air will ascend first, and afterwards the element of fire, whi
ch expert artists recognise.
Paracelsus
Give me a condor s quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
Herman Melville

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into
sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold
.
Navarre Scott Momaday

He looked like a halibut which had been asked by another halibut to lend it a co
uple of quid till next Wednesday.
P. G. Wodehouse

There s luck in art. There s the gift. You can t earn that. But you can learn skill, y
ou can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.
Ursula K. Le Guin

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat
back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Leonardo da Vinci

Beware the hobby that eats.

Benjamin Franklin

Fear is the mother of morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
Abraham Lincoln

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary th
ings, and nothing else.
C. S. Lewis
The great square has no corners.
The great vessel is never finished.
The great tone is barely heard.
The great thought can t be thought.
Lao Tzu

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in t
he running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wis
dom created nothing under the sun in vain.
Kahlil Gibran

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.

Nikki Giovanni

Gardens are not made by singing Oh, how beautiful, and sitting in the shade.
Rudyard Kipling

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect o
f illusion.
Robert Burton

Those people who recognize that imagination is reality s master we call sages, and
those who act upon it we call artists or lunatics.
Tom Robbins

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it
away.
Victor Hugo

Once we choose hope, everything is possible.

Christopher Reeve

Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.

John Cleese

The meaning of being only becomes apparent in events.

Alvin Kernan

To be a writer is to sit down at one s desk in the chill portion of every day, and
to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start f
rom the breastbone just plain going at it.
John Hersey

There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.
Nikolai Gogol

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

Voltaire

My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They re not written vicariously: th
ey come out of actual suffering, real madness.
Theodore Roethke

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to
manage a fool.
Rudyard Kipling

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you
don t do it, and it won t happen.
Erasmus

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life
that is to say, over 35 there has not been one whose problem in the last resort
was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Carl Jung

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

Rudyard Kipling

Craft enables art.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency
.
John Updike

Where every something, being blent together, turns to a wild of nothing.

William Shakespeare

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

Will Rogers

Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.

Bishop Berkeley
Perhaps the most important word in success and happiness is the word ask.
Brian Tracy

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to
read on the train.
Oscar Wilde

If you want to write it your own way, that s the chance you take.
Marchette Chute

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought.

Daphne DuMaurier

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot.

Ingmar Bergman

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
Peter Shaffer

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.

Richard Bach

I am a part of all I have read.

John Kieran

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matter
s.
Seneca

To live till you die is to live long enough.

Lao Tzu
There are moments when an object, a person, a living creature is utterly present
and naked, is utterly itself, and this startling moment can only be called beau
ty. This presents a dilemma. Is the tree showing itself to me, or am I allowing
myself to see?
Deena Metzger

I m not alone when I m writing the language itself, like a kind of trampoline, is th
ere helping me.
Sir Edward William Stafford

So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice;
then darkness again and a silence.
Longfellow

If you think you re boring your audience, go slower not faster.

Gustav Mahler

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning: if they attract attention
to themselves, it is a fault. In the very best styles you read page after page w
ithout noticing the medium.
Samuel Tayler Coleridge

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

Rudyard Kipling

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

Erasmus

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal

Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.

Anne Sullivan
Soon or late love is his own avenger.
Lord Byron

For the Creator, there is no poverty.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything that doesn t kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it
in some story.
Tapani Bagge

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The presence of beauty heals.

Deena Metzger

All that is, isn t. All that isn t, is.

Scott Jeffries

All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
Jean Anouilh

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; its habitation is all out under

the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the cr
eatures of God are free.
Mark Twain

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our fo
llies it is the first law of nature.
Voltaire
The men who succeed are the few who have the ambition and willpower to develop t
hemselves.
Robert Burton

The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains.
Lao Tzu

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women a
nd young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and lead him constant
ly into danger.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

The earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your h
air.
Kahlil Gibran

History is not another name for the past. It is the name for stories about the p
ast.
Alan John Percivale Taylor

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Oscar Wilde

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

Frank Zappa
Getting even is one reason for writing.
William Gass

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

W. H. Auden

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men s writings so that you shall c
ome easily by what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Benjamin Disraeli

Things are beautiful if you love them.

Jean Anouilh

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with tha
t of man.
Henry David Thoreau

I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead.
Graycie Harmon

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
Winston Churchill

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.

Nikolai Gogol

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper
; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished.
William Shakespeare
Coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.
Aristotle

When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.
Humpty Dumpty

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that
true reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by fin
ding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau

Happiness is no vague dream. Of that I now feel certain.

George Sand

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and ca
lm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their co
nflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Carl Jung

Art is either plagarism or revolution.

Paul Gaugain

It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is intensity.

Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton

Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear nothing?

William Wordsworth
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I t
hought, and attended to my answer.
Henry David Thoreau

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned
up to 50 words of English, no human has been reported to have learned dolphinese
.
Carl Sagan

Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out wh
en you re coming home his face might burn up.
Jack Handy

Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, gener
ous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.
Geoffrey Chaucer

Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue:
always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talki
ng about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the ar
tist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of w
omen artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps o
f sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter
and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of
an instrument.
Henry David Thoreau

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritan
ces, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
Jean Anouilh
The true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastlines
s is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancie
nt, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of s
trength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection o
f the hideous.
H. P. Lovecraft

Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been. I am also called No-More, Too-Late,

Farewell.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two diff
erent kinds of right.
Peter Shaffer

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw
it still.
Henry David Thoreau

Pick today s fruits, not relying on the future in the slightest.

Horace

Don t use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

A good name is seldom got by giving it to oneself.

William Wycherly

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to
the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools th
e way to dusty death.
William Shakespeare

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encou
rage the others.
Voltaire

Nature doesn t make long speeches.

Lao Tzu

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

John Updike

Literature doesn t matter. The only thing that matters is money and getting your t
eeth fixed!
Delmore Schwartz

I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers to apply them
to the expression of my own thoughts.
Shirley Ann Grau

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Henry David Thoreau

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

W. Edwards Deming

O Thou with whom are all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, out of whose infinit
e mind this universal frame sprang forth in a moment of time, grant unto me grac
e to know Thy blessedness and Thy goodness. In no other way shall I come to the
knowledge of the Blessed Stone.
George Ripley

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

Daphne du Maurier

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

Erasmus

I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.

William Safire

All that spirits desire, spirits attain.

Kahlil Gibran

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the stor
y of what appeared to happen.
Mary Roberts Rinehart

To grow in craft is to increase the breadth of what I can do, but art is the dep
th, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.
Pat Schneider

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Henry David Thoreau

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Voltaire

Read something luminous at night.

Edmund Wilson
More energy, less taste! Remember, keep moving!
Robert Frank

Use the fewest words to sing your song.

Rowland Hill

Story is change.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen.
H. P. Lovecraft

We are energy beings.

Jill Bolte Taylor

It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one s life as a
writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seem
s to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk.
It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forev
er on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a
truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.
Harlan Ellison

One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemming ot
hers.
Molière

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for t
he love of Man and in praise of God, and I d be a damn fool if they weren t.
Dylan Thomas

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
The hand is an instrument for using instruments; and the mind is a form for usin
g forms.
Aristotle

The sky above the port was the color of television.

William Gibson

If suffer we must, let us suffer on the heights.

Victor Hugo

I d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who

is reaching for a star. I d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been by far; fo
r a might-have-been has never been, but a has-been was once an are.
Milton Berle

The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read
a line from your typewriter that you didn t know was in you.
Larry L. King

The brain that doesn t feed itself, eats itself.

Gore Vidal

It might seem that the writer needs the gift of mimicry, like an impersonator, t
o achieve this variety of voices. But it isn t that. It s more like what a serious a
ctor does, sinking self in character-self. It s a willingness to be the characters
, letting what they think and say rise from inside them. It s a willingness to sha
re control with one s creation.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Stupidity is no excuse for not thinking.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction

of personality.
T. S. Eliot

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

John Keats

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Satire is tragedy plus time.

Lenny Bruce

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

Henry David Thoreau

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood.

Ever Garrison

Don t explain why it works; explain how you use it.

Steven Brust

Pride is still aiming at the best abodes,

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell;
Aspiring to be angels men rebel.
Alexander Pope

The most effective effort is continuing effort, which patience makes possible.
Unknown

Protest crying is very hard to soothe.

Dr. Judith K. Nelson
To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands int
o life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.
Jean Anouilh

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Voltaire

The main thing is to take a blank sheet of paper and write the first sentence. F
rom that first sentence springs the second, by some miracle, and then the subjec
t emerges what the critics call the basic concept or the conception of the work.
Valentin Katayev

Think you re escaping and run into yourself.

James Joyce

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a
short distance correctly.
Edward Albee

Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of wo
rds connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me.
Gloria Naylor

Writing itself is an act of faith, and nothing else.

E. B. White

Living people are soft and tender. Corpses are hard and stiff.
Lao Tzu
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
Kahlil Gibran

Silence is the mother of truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

Glory be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to t

he making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Alexander Pope

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

William Butler Yeats

To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow s

pirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The oldest, shortest words yes and no are those which require the most thought.
Pythagoras

I always write the end of everything first. Then I go back to the beginning. I m
ean, it s always nice to know where you re going, is my theory.
Truman Capote

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. But not necessarily in that order
.
Robert Silverberg

There is no what should be, there is only what is.

Lenny Bruce

No great artist ever sees things as they really are.

Oscar Wilde

Sometimes I think I d be better off dead. No, wait, not me, you.
Jack Handy

I never started from ideas but always from character.

Ivan Turgenev

Name names. Make your writing physical. Use lots of exact nouns. Food is an idea
; black-bean soup is a thing. Naming not only makes the writing more visceral, i
t makes the reader trust you. And use your own expertise, whatever insider infor
mation you have. Use words like soffit, draw shave, spit valve.
David Long

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
Daphne du Maurier

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I th
ink children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.
Peter Shaffer

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:
when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
Charles Dickens

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

I am two fools I know, for loving and for saying so.

John Donne

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Dionysius the Elder

The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is se
t to human reason where it must halt.
Maimonides

Speaking openly is the gift we give each other.

Deena Metzger

Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what th
ey seem to be.
Hubert Humphrey

God s finger touched him, and he slept.

Alfred Lord Tennyson
It is better to be alone than in bad company.
George Washington

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much p
erforms much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.
Vincent Van Gogh

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can t do anything else, read
all that you can.
Jane Hamilton

Write with no one looking over your shoulder.

Barbara Kingsolver

Fantasy doesn t have to be fantastic.

Terry Pratchett

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman

Some nights, I just want to pour out my soul into a glass and drink it.
Don Kraus

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always re
ading.
Jeremy Collier

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag ha
s been left.
Alexander Pope
When one burns one s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
Dylan Thomas

Fictional characters soon take on a life of their own. They run with the bit bet
ween their teeth.
Jay Parini

The vague is more dangerous than the arid.

Theodore Roethke

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the pow
er of speech to stir men s blood; I only speak right on.
William Shakespeare

If writing seems hard, it s because it is hard.

William Zinsser

Let s have some new cliches.

Samuel Goldwyn

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop
in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a p
ool that nobody s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted b
y the mind.
Katherine Mansfield

I pay no attention whatever to anybody s praise or blame. I simply follow my own f

eelings.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from whi
ch a rationalist turns away in horror, claiming afterward that he did not see an
ything.
Carl Jung
Temper is a weapon we hold by the blade.
James M. Barrie

In a good story, all the necessary elements are present and all the extraneous e
lements have been removed nothing is forced or arbitrary; it has an organic form
.
Deena Metzger

In our wisdom let us not forget, it is the pause that creates the music.
Kathleen Arnason

Mu.
Joshu

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal

We don t come into this world, we grow out of it.

Wayne Dyer

I cannot help it in spite of myself, infinity torments me.

Alfred de Musset

The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. Bring me the fin
est simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a si
ngle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent an
alogy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dar
k to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don t have for som
ething they don t need.
Will Rogers

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun.

Buckminster Fuller

Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as et
ernally established.
Rudyard Kipling

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe in life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for reveal
ing them to the trees.
Kahlil Gibran

In Heaven there is no religion, thank God.

Mahatma Gandhi

The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences every
thing, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with c
reative lust.
George Bellows

Anyone who has got a library and a garden wants for nothing.
Cicero

It is always good when one has two irons in the fire.

Francis Beaumont
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwar
ds his own airy citadel.
John Keats

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Henry David Thoreau

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Benjamin Disraeli

No blame.
I Ching

Too much verbal stimulation causes the work to suffer.

Gene Black

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might
, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
Jack Handy

Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use e
stablish the life you experience.
Sonia Croquette

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margi
n fades for ever and forever when I move.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day.
Elbert Hubbard

Every word has two existences, as a spoken word and a written. A word exists as
truly for the eye as for the ear.
Richard Chenevix Trench

So suddenly have you cleared your brows, and with so frolic and hearty a laughte
r given me your applause, that in truth as many of you as I behold on every side
of me seem no less than Homer s gods drunk with nectar and nepenthe; whereas befo
re, you sat as lumpish and pensive as if you had come from consulting an oracle.
Erasmus

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then

it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde

He who has never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Samuel Smiles

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.
Dylan Thomas

A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory round

it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.
Joseph Addison

In not wanting is stillness. In stillness all under heaven rests.

Lao Tzu

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a c

ounselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of
other people.
Carl Jung

I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I m going to write it in German to s
ee if anyone notices.
Rick Reilly

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
Umberto Eco

In extremis, things reveal their nature and become visible.

Paracelcus

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must gro
w by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfami
liar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that it isn t in the dictionary
although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no a
uthor ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.
Ambrose Bierce

A great rock is not disturbed by the wind.

Dalai Lama

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Madness is not the result of uncertainty, but certainty.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art for my sake.

D. H. Lawrence
Civilisation s greatest single invention is the sentence.
John Banville

Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat s ear, but only the wisest of ca
ts would think to look there.
Andrew Mercer

Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation a
nd a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hy
sterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you ve nailed that particul
ar sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to
be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane h
uman could read without vomiting. But when you re in the zone, spinning words like
plates, there s a deep sense of satisfaction.
Hari Kunzru

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is t

he original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for ano
ther.
Thomas Carlyle

The future has already arrived. It s just not evenly distributed yet.
William Gibson

The soul s joy lies in doing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth
.
Benjamin Disraeli

People with low self-esteem ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Bill Wall

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction.

Will Self

The weak can never forgive.

Mahatma Gandhi

Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.

James Allen

Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

Lao Tzu

These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea t
o express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that del
iberation cannot interfere.
Bill Evans

Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his th
oughts uses an iron which has cooled. He cannot inflame the minds of his audienc
e.
Henry David Thoreau

The most positive men are the most credulous.

Alexander Pope

Poetry should appear almost a remembrance.

John Keats

It s not what you look at that matters, it s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau
I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened.
Mark Twain

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Kahlil Gibran

There is but one art, to omit!

Robert Louis Stevenson

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters o
f earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument
of science and words are but the signs of ideas.
Samuel Johnson

Is anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

Voltaire

Everyone s life is a fairy tale written by God s fingers.

Hans Christian Andersen

We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted fo
r us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to tak
e back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Hildegard von Bingen

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media valida

te reality. If you don t believe this, just think how many times you ve described so
me real event as being just like a movie.
Brad Holland

Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat kee
p time with short steps.
Hans Christian Andersen

What we wish, we readily believe.

Demosthenes

I never knew a writer who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the
same time readable.
Samuel Butler

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yoursel
f do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or n
ot.
Thomas Henry Huxley

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence
, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best an
d truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to m
e, but is indeed very soothing and consoling. And I thank my God for graciously
granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the
door to our true happiness.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

There s a great power in words, if you don t hitch too many of them together.
Josh Billings

Listen, young man. Forget all about your books and machine-made current associat
ions.
H. P. Lovecraft

San Francisco is a mad city inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane peop
le whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will
have the most need to know.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
It s easy to sit there and say you d like to have more money. And I guess that s what
I like about it. It s easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting th
at money.
Jack Handy

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
Marcus Aurelius

The Seven Principles of Huna:

Ike: The world is what you think it is.
Makia: Energy flows where attention goes.
Aloha: To love is to be happy with.
Manava: Now is the moment of power.
Mana: All power comes from within.
Kala: All is limitless.
Pono: Effectiveness is the measure of truth.
Unknown

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intel
ligence and make it a soul?
John Keats

Man: a being in search of meaning.

Plato

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Demosthenes

I have revered always not crude verbosity, but holy simplicity.

Saint Jerome

Clean underwear is a waste.

Ford Anderson
Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
Scott Turow

It is unwise to be too sure of one s own wisdom.

Mahatma Gandhi

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Henry David Thoreau

Bring down that which is above by means of the light. To ascend take from darkne
ss into light that which is below by means of light. This will transform the spi
ritual energy as it flows from the source and integrates all the islands, giving
peace. This will affect you profoundly, and change your life bringing illuminat
ion, and you will feel the delightful supreme fire.
Kahuna Kapihe

Almost in every kingdom the most ancient families have been at first princes bast
ards.
Robert Burton

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and be
come merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a hum

an being.
James Joyce

All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

People are only doing the best they can with the resources they have available.
NLP saying
Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever
it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beau
ty, make flowers bloom even on the edge of the precipice.
Margaret Fuller

Men have been chained to hideous walls and other strange anchors but few have kn
own such suffering and bitterness as those who have been bound to pens.
Charles Dickens

Pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

Alexander Pope

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, s
o, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satis
faction from a single aspiration.
Sigmund Freud

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magi
c in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work w
ill be completed.
Jean Anouilh

Your library is your paradise.

Erasmus

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
Hans Christian Andersen

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Herbert Spencer

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe you might as well tell a
man not to wake but sleep.
Lord Byron

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least importa
nt and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Your battles inspired me not the obvious material battles but those that were fo
ught and won behind your forehead.
James Joyce

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankin

d.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

When one s thoughts are neither frivolous nor flippant, when one s thoughts are neit
her stiff-necked nor stupid, but rather, are harmonious they habitually render p
hysical calm and deep insight.
Hildegard von Bingen

To remind a man of the good turns you have done him is very much like a reproach
.
Demosthenes

When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in
their own keeping.
Gilgamesh

The part I enjoy is the re-writing. Increasingly, I enjoy the dullest, most cler
ical stages of the process. Having said that, there always comes a point, after
I ve amassed enough material and can start knocking it into shape, when I begin lo
oking forward to working on something.
Geoff Dyer

The greatest instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The squirrel you kill in jest dies in earnest.
Henry David Thoreau

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself.

André Gide

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it

is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone can make good writ
ing because only that is worth writing about, worth the sweat and the agony.
William Faulkner

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 great rewriters
.
James A. Michener

Life is God s novel. Let him write it.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

What is your original face, the face you had before your parents were born?
Zen koan

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

William Gibson

Nothing of him doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and st
range.
William Shakespeare
We don t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anaïs Nin

The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit not by want. Men do not become tyrants
so as not to suffer cold.
Aristotle

I can only gesture at what makes a story good.

Leonard Michaels

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alon
e to make answer.
Voltaire

Well done is better than well said.

Benjamin Franklin

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate br
ings you together, but do so with all your heart.
Marcus Aurelius

Concerning the true and First Matter of Metals: the first matter of metals is tw
ofold, and one without the other cannot create a metal. The first and principal
substance is the moisture of air mingled with warmth. This substance the Sages h
ave called Mercury, and in the philosophical sea it is governed by the rays of t
he Sun and the Moon. The second substance is the dry heat of the earth, which is
called Sulphur. But as this substance has always been kept a great mystery, let
us declare it more fully, and especially its weight.
Michael Sendivogius

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

Pablo Picasso

Fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.
Homer Simpson

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

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who wil
l deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
Maimonides

Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write
to please yourself.
Harlan Ellison

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Henry David Thoreau

First you have to get up and then you have to keep on going.
Cameron Hughes

Show, don t tell.

Henry James

A stiff apology is a second insult.

G. K. Chesterton

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and comma
nd of language is the fruit of exercise.
Edward Gibbon

My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.

Hildegard von Bingen
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to st
eal with good judgement.
Henry Wheeler Shaw

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

Voltaire

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals y
our sick self.
Kahlil Gibran

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

June Jordan

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children s childr
en, because I don t think children should be having sex.
Jack Handy

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem th
ose who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

Fear doesn t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessit
y, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
Steven Pressfield
For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasu
res are in store.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Poetry is an expression, through human language restored to it essential rhythm,

of the mysteriousness of existence.
Stéphane Mallarmé

To live in the world of creation to get into it and stay in it to frequent and h
aunt it to think intensely and fruitfully to woo combinations and inspirations i
nto being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditations this is the onl
y thing.
Henry James

The Creatures in the School:

Do not worry them.
Do not vex them.
Do not bother them.
Sumerian signpost

All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.
Miyamoto Musashi

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.

Mae West

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can wr
ite will be the best you are.
Henry David Thoreau

You can t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.
Nikolai Gogol

Something is missing in my heart tonight

That has made made my eyes so soft
And my voice so tender
And my need of God so absolutely clear.
Hafiz of Persia

I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, Ho
w do you do it? How do you get started? It s so difficult. I told him, I don t know b
ut whatever you do don t stop. Just keep on going.
Benny Goodman

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

Silence is the mother of truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

We take in the words and move on, but are somehow changed by them.
Karen Phinney

Pornography is man s refuge from sex.

Bill Wall

At times I think and at times I am.

Paul Valery

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Franz Kafka

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

William Shakespeare
When I realize that every task can be an act of worship, even the tasks I despis
e take on new value.
Norman Prather

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the p
rocess.
Peter Shaffer

Be the valley of the world.

Lao Tzu

She danced the dance of flames and fire, she danced the dance of swords and spea
rs, she danced the dance of stars and the dance of space, and then she danced th
e dance of flowers in the wind.
Khalil Gibran

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

Mae West

I cannot live without books.

Thomas Jefferson

One has to live a life that creates a writer.

Erno Paasilinna

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.

Joseph Joubert
Don t take life so serious. It ain t no-hows permanent.
Walt Kelly

There will never be another now I ll make the most of today. There will never be a
nother me I ll make the most of myself.
Helen Keller

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

He said, You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic. I got up and walked out
of that class and never went back.
Carolyn Kizer

You have to know the human heart.

Thom Jones

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

Yogi Berra

We re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese proverb

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to
college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did
George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought
to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?
Jamaica Kincaid

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

Luis Buñuel
Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are relea
sed from weak specifications.
Henry James

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic k

nowledge.
H.G. Wells

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of me
at?
John Cleese

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

Katharine Hepburn

A stream cannot rise about its source.

African proverb

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
G. K. Chesterton

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it s in music or in life, somethin
g as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.
Benny Goodman

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light
of your own being.
Hafiz of Persia

I always picture myself as that person at a cocktail party standing in the corne
r and watching.
Neil Simon
Be not a slave of words.
Thomas Carlyle

Fairy tale brings a larger dimension into our lives, but myth takes us beyond ou
rselves.
Deena Metzger

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one s attitude in any given set of cir
cumstances.
Victor Frankl

There are many reasons for this unease. One of them is a fundamental discomfort
with narrative itself, and involves admitting to yourself that you derive your b
asic pleasure not from knowing what happens next, but from arrested time or even
tlessness.
Amit Chaudhuri

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar ob
jects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

When man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must b
e able to comprehend everything.
Maimonides

Why shouldn t we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any
software, for nothing?
William Gibson

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Charles Baudelaire
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you r
e a great writer, you must say that you are.
Gore Vidal

If the sex scene doesn t make you want to do it whatever it is they re doing it hasn t
been written right.
Sloan Wilson

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen
. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brillia
nt passage so long as it doesn t advance the story.
Frank Yerby

I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I d just
quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing
that anyway.
Jack Handy

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another whi
ch suits it better.
René Magritte

A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands ca

n read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.
G. I. Gurdjieff

Sigh. So much to do. So few people to do it for me.

Paula Brett

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin s.

Marianne Faithfull

Perceive that which cannot be seen by the eye.

Miyamoto Musashi

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the

sum total of a man s thinking or his writing.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Take mineral Cinnabar and prepare it in the following manner. Cook it with rain
water in a stone vessel for three hours. Then purify it carefully, and dissolve
it in Aqua Regis, which is composed of equal parts of vitriol, nitre, and sal am
moniac. Another formula is vitriol, saltpetre, alum, and common salt. Distil thi
s in an alembic. Pour it on again, and separate carefully the pure from the impu
re thus. Let it putrefy for a month in horse-dung; then separate the elements in
the following manner. If it puts forth its signal, commence the distillation by
means of an alembic with a fire of the first degree. The water and the air will
ascend; the fire and the earth will remain at the bottom. Afterwards join them
again, and gradually treat with the ashes. So the water and the air will again a
scend first, and afterwards the element of fire, which expert artists recognise.
The earth will remain in the bottom of the vessel. This collect there. It is wh
at many seek after and few find.
Paracelcus

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything peop
le tell them.
Demosthenes

If a man s character is to be abused, there s nobody like a relative to do the busin

ess.
Alexander Pope

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

William Shakespeare

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Kahlil Gibran
This is the most autobiographical song I ve ever written. I m thankful I had the pre
sence of mind never to put any words to it.
Bennett Williams

A critic is a man who knows the way but can t drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan

No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of
teeth.
Harry Houdini

The chief beginning of evil is goodness in excess.

Menander

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thi
rty years of his life.
Muhammad Ali

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

Mae West

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

To me, who has written for most of her adult life, in a number of genres and wit
h wildly varying degrees of enjoyment and/or misery , it s likely that writing is a con
scious variant of a deep-motivated unconscious activity, like dreaming.
Joyce Carol Oates

Soul meets soul on lovers lips.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they
are after.
Henry David Thoreau

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

George Eliot

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
Marcell Marceau

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T. S. Eliot

Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes

My eyes glaze over at a writer solving tiny problems.

Doris Grumbach

He never gave utterance in words to his feelings of the glories of nature. Words
were not his instruments of expression colour was the only medium open to him.
J. M. MacCallum

The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what t
hey are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of
art.
Oscar Wilde

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examin
e it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselv
es.
Carl Jung
Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but
as if you were learning an instrument.
J. B. Priestley

The poet is a man who lives by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to
watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Henry David Thoreau

The great artist is the simplifier.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid pers
on to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought
over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like
inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
Kurt Vonnegut

I came to understand that the words executive and corporate never belong next to
the word chef.
Thomas Keller

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Kahlil Gibran

Being is born of nothing.

Lao Tzu

A woman s guess is much more accurate than a man s certainty.

Rudyard Kipling
He ne er is crowned with immortality who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
John Keats

On the neck of a young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.

Hafiz of Persia

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it s time to pause and ref
lect.
Mark Twain

Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber
whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling aro
und on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
Dorothy Parker

Psyche creating itself, entering the labyrinth of the inner world, confronting g
ood and evil, sexuality, encountering the lost feminine, and reconciling the opp
osites, life and death, dark and light, male and female, upper world and underwo
rld, barrenness and creativity these are the central focuses of the Eleusinian M
ysteries, and they are the quintessential concerns of the larger story.
Deena Metzger

All pitchers are liars or crybabies.

Yogi Berra

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the
meaning of the mind itself is unknown.
René Magritte

No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of
teeth.
Harry Houdini
Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.
Menander

People often say that motivation doesn t last. Well, neither does bathing. That s wh
y we recommend it daily.
Zig Ziglar

Nothing is as sacred as the integrity of your own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often ve
ry tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppres
sion.
H. L. Mencken

Generous people are rarely mentally ill.

Karl Menninger

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O Rourke

This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well.
Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the pow
er to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your
own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy
.
Susan Polis Schutz

A quiet mind is more important than a positive mind.

Deepak Chopra

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.
Katharine Hepburn

A novel is a narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Randall Jarrell

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Viktor E. Frankl

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.
Tom Robbins

Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.

Hugh Prather

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Unknown

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

John Gregory Dunne

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I
write: The man sat on the grass, because it is clear and does not detain one s atte
ntion. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if
I write: The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat
down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians,
sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully. The brain can t grasp all
that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.
Anton Chekhov

There s hardly anywhere in literature where you don t find a triangle.

Leonard Michaels

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.
Richard Curtis

Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
Benjamin Disraeli

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Voltaire

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Alexander Pope

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what
you ve got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer
to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, To hell with you.
Saul Bellow

Being born is like being kidnapped and then sold into slavery.
William Shakespeare

Whether they find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy p
lanet.
Jack Handy

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Samuel Butler

Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no mystery about art. Do the things that you can see, they will show yo
u those that you cannot see. By doing what you can you will gradually get to kno
w what it is that you want to do and cannot do, and so be able to do it.
Samuel Butler

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan that is the rule.
John Fowles

The only reason I didn t kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was
because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn t decide which one to jump in
to.
Wilfrid Sheed

Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
Alexander Pope

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.

Demosthenes

Generally speaking, the Way of the Warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

Miyamoto Musashi

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West

Our knowledge is a tiny island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I m an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

May you live all the days of your life.

Jonathan Swift

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Henry David Thoreau

The man who makes no mistakes usually does not make anything.
Edward John Phelps

The words that love inspires outlive their utterance.

Horace

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Dostoevsky

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitud
e with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind
is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Seneca

He wrapped himself in quotations as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple

of Emperors.
Rudyard Kipling

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there w
ould be no life.
John Updike
I have always said and felt that true enjoyment cannot be described.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

When you go to the dark place you must come back singing.
Deena Metzger

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Paula Brett

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows;
it becomes what the world offers it.
René Magritte

You must do the very thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full.

Henry David Thoreau

If it s never our fault, we can t take responsibility for it. If we can t take respons
ibility for it, we ll always be its victim.
Richard Bach

Traditional words are just babbling in that presence, and babbling is a substitu
te for sight.
Rumi

In the long years liker they must grow; the man be more of woman, she of man.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don t try.
Beverly Sills

Art has an obligation to offend.

Edward Albee

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Anaïs Nin

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it ne

cessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose
to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose and you allow him to make war at
pleasure.
Abraham Lincoln

Don t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what y
ou have to say. It s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver

Get black on white.

Guy de Maupassant

When writing a novel, that s pretty much entirely what life turns into: House burne
d down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pr
etty good day.
Neil Gaiman

Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going?

Constantin Stanislavski

There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one
of them is right.
Rudyard Kipling
Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.
John L Heureux

Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me. Remain calm on the surface and paddle
like hell underneath.
Michael Caine

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published.
A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.
George Konrád

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
William Blake

Attention is Key. Pay attention to anything long enough or correctly the first t
ime, and you will understand.
Dr. Suderland Vildenstroff

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very will
ing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and
brutal.
Flannery O Connor

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James

People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likel
y to when your words are pursuing them.
Edwin H. Friedman
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man i
s never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the sam
e even for half an hour.
G. I. Gurdjieff

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them
.
Rabindranath Tagore

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Voltaire

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the clos
est our country has ever been to being even.
Will Rogers

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And i
t has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that
his brain child is a deformed idiot.
L. Sprague de Camp

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Henry Moore

I m afraid of coaching, of writer s classes, of writer s magazines, of books on how to

write. They give me centipede trouble you know the yarn about the centipede who
was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think abo
ut it, and was never able to walk another step.
Robert A. Heinlein

Fuck the plot.

Edna O Brien

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money from this state
of being.
A. A. Milne

What we think, we become.

Buddha

I don t have a moral plan. I m a Canadian.

David Cronenberg

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibi

lity on the west coast.
Viktor E. Frankl

In the most basic sense, the purpose of life is being as opposed to not being.
Seth

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

Rabindranath Tagore

Culture makes all men gentle.

Menander

The air around us is charged with the storyteller s presence. We are inside a magi
c circle, and no harm can befall us until the tale is done.
Victor Perera

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Marc Chagall
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
Mae West

Behind or within our cultures are individual lives. And behind or within them ar
e stories. Behind these stories are archetypal tales. Behind these tales are str
ange forces that combine and recombine to reveal and create the world.
Deena Metzger

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious d
esign of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Henry David Thoreau

Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is par
amount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

Aldous Huxley

Work is a four-letter word; art and fun have but three.

Hap Hagood

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Oscar Wilde

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do i
t if you felt that it didn t matter.
Edward Albee

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of h
is own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
W. B. Yeats
Cthulhu still lives, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded
him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more; but his mini
sters on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in
lonely places.
H. P. Lovecraft

Let the odour of the eye of Horus adhere to thee.

The Pyramid Inscriptions

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.
Hafiz of Persia

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Henry David Thoreau

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated,

so famous, that it would permit me to break wind in society, and society would t
hink it a most natural thing.
Honoré de Balzac

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was

the last to discover America.
James Joyce

You can make a better living in this world as a soothsayer than as a truth-sayer
.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Kahlil Gibran

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
James M. Barrie
The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
Nicholas-Sébastien Chamfort

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I cringe when critics say I m a master of the popular novel. What s an unpopular nov
el?
Irwin Shaw

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

Stanley Kunitz

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
Simone Weil

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground not a flying carpet to
set you free from probability.
Robertson Davies

I ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of makin
g other chances.
Anne Tyler

Every secret of a writer s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of hi
s mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Woody Allen
One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy
family.
Pat Conroy

I want to make your flesh creep.

Charles Dickens

If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find
plenty of inspiration for his work.
Willa Cather

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Henry David Thoreau

If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet you could shoot
beer out your nose.
Jack Handy

Except for the young or very happy, I can t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here? Whence, whence this manifold creat
ion sprang? The Gods themselves came later into being Who knows from whence this
great creation sprang?
H. P. Blavatsky

Live or die but don t poison everything.

Saul Bellow

Summertime
And the livin is easy,
Fish are jumpin
And the cotton is high.
Oh yo daddy s rich
An yo ma is good lookin
So hush, little baby,
Don t you cry.
One of these mornin s,
You s gonna rise up singin
Then you ll spread yo wings
An you ll take to the sky.
But till that mornin ,
There s ain t nothin can harm you
With your Daddy an Mummy
Standin by.
Cole Porter

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

Honoré de Balzac

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has
lost everything except his reason.
G. K. Chesterton

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he s about 75.

Irwin Shaw

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in
your work.
Gustave Flaubert

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to rea

d your diary except your mother.
Richard Peck
There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille Paglia

I feel it now: there s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world. I know t
hat nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed
me.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I felt early on I wasn t going to be a respectable citizen.

Cormac McCarthy

When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. Whe
n we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.
Vickie Karp

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder wh
ether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions what we do that we are happy

or the reverse.
Aristotle

Never be sincere sincerity is the death of writing.

Gordon Lish

Express yourself in a plain, easy manner, in well-chosen, significant, and decen

t terms, and give an harmonious and pleasing turn to your periods.
Cervantes

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Friedrich Nietzsche
My crown is in my heart, not on my head.
William Shakespeare

Suffering avoided leads to emptiness.

Oswald Spengler

Man s conscience is the oracle of God.

Lord Byron

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to

find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
Benjamin Franklin

A broad margin