"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

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

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."
— Jules Renard

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."
— Ernest Hemingway

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."
— Anne Lamott

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)"
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who's going, "Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!" And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, "Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!" I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world--present and in awe."
— Anne Lamott

"Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned."
— Anne Lamott

"I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host."
— Dorothy Parker

"What fresh hell is this?"
— Dorothy Parker (The Portable Dorothy Parker)

"No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. "
— Betty Friedan

"It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself."
— Betty Friedan

"“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”"
— Betty Friedan

"Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open."
— Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within)

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"Writers block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."
— Steve Martin

"By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of this books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you."
— Stephanie Klein (Straight up and Dirty)

"Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real."
— Jeanette Winterson (Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles)

"I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry"
— — J.R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar: A Memoir)

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings."
— Cheris Kramarae

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men."
— Gloria Steinem

"I was more addicted to self destruction then to the drugs themselves ... something very romantic about it"
— Gerard Way

"Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't."
— David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
— James Baldwin

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."
— James Baldwin

"A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
"
— Gloria Steinem

"I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

And once you have achieved a state of happiness you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
— Emily Dickinson

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."
— Dorothy Parker

"Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks."
— Lorrie Moore