"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)

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

"CALVIN:
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning & inhibit clarity."
— Bill Watterson

"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

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

"Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to."
— Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne)

"Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding."
— Stephen King

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
— Stephen King

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. 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 is to shovel shit from a sitting position."
— Stephen King

"...you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

"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 is it for."
— Alice Walker

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
— Ernest Hemingway

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
— Mark Twain

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics."
— Benjamin Disraeli

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
— Mark Twain

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

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."
— Mark Twain

"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
— Mark Twain

"The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle."
— Stephen King (Night Shift)

"I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
— Anne Lamott

"You can either practice being right or practice being kind."
— Anne Lamott

"Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more."
— Mark Twain

"But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?'"
— Anne Lamott

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out."
— Anne Lamott

"To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. "
— Anne Lamott

"The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then ransformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears."
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)