"'Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.'"
— Lori Lansens (The Girls)

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

"
— Richard Bach

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

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

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

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

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

"So what? All writers are lunatics!"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"It's only words and words are all I have to take your heart away"
— Barry Gibb

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."
— Margaret Atwood

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle