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

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

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

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

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

"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. --Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

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

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

"Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"silence is not a natural environment for stories, .....they need words without them they grow stale, sicken and die.And then they haunt you.
"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

"I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"The whole problem with people is--The problem is they KNOW what matters, but they don't CHOOSE it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)