"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 no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

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

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
— Maya Angelou

"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

"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

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

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
— Winston S. Churchill

"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

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

"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

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

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"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 best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

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

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

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

"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

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

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. (from the introduction)"
— Stephen King (Skeleton Crew)

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

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

Dead Poet's Society"
— John Keating

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
— Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Truman Capote

"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)

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

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."
— Italo Calvino

"Poems are never finished - just abandoned"
— Paul Valéry

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

"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it is then discovered."
— Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

"If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagerise or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall."
— Morrissey

"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

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paper work."
— Peter Devries

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
— Philip Pullman

"A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing."
— Garrison Keillor

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."
— Harper Lee

"I found this on her website, and I liked what she said, cause I like to write, and her tips are very helpful. She begins here:
Beware: I can only give writing tips for my style of writing, because I don't know how to do anything else!

My focus is the characters--that's the part of the story that is most important to me. I feel the best way to write believable characters is to really believe in them yourself. When you hear a song on the radio, you should know how your character feels about it--which songs your character would relate to, which songs she hates. Hear the conversations that your characters would have when they're not doing anything exciting; let them talk in your head, get to know them. Know their favorite colors and their opinions on current events, their birthdays and their flaws. None of this goes in the book, it's just to help you get a rounded feel to them.

I think outlining--in a very non-structured, free-flowing form--can really help. I didn't have to do that with Twilight, but it was very necessary for the other two books. I changed my outlines often as the writing led me in other directions--the outline is just a tool, not something mandatory that you have to follow.

Some of the best advice on writing I got from Janet Evanovich's website. She said if you want to be a writer as a profession, then treat it like a job. Put in the hours. Set aside time for writing, and then make yourself sit down and do it. Sometimes it's easy--the words flow and you can get a lot done. Other times it's hard, and you might only get one sentence done in an hour. But that's better than nothing.

Here's a tip that really helped me with book two and three: forget writing in order. With New Moon and Eclipse, I wrote out whichever scenes I was interested in, rather than starting at the beginning and working through to the end. I wrote most of the books in scenes, and then went back later and tied the scenes together. It cut out a lot of writer's block to write whatever part I was most interested in at the time. And it makes it easy to finish. By the time you get around to writing the less exciting transitions, expositions, and descriptions, you already have so much done! You can see a full novel coming together, and that's very motivating. (But you really need an outline to work that way--to keep from getting lost!)"
— Stephenie Meyer

"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

"I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography."
— Steven Wright

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be"
— Abraham H. Maslow

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
— Colette

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)