"Write about the emotions you fear the most."
— Laurie Halse Anderson

"It's a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you've mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You've done your research, gathering the facts; historical, social, climatic culinary, that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with color, contrast and telling detail.
Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing.
In spite the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been pestering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: IT WON'T WORK.
An element is missing, that spark that brings to life in a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right.
Your story is emotionally dead, that's the crux of it.
The discovery is something soul-destroying, I tell you. It leaves you with an aching hunger."
— Yann Martel

"This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this."
— Real Live Preacher

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
— Ernest Hemingway

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
— Ernest Hemingway

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

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector."
— Ernest Hemingway

"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it."
— Ernest Hemingway

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Any man's life, told truly, is a novel..."
— Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)

"Good writing is good conversation, only more so."
— Ernest Hemingway

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

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. "
— Ernest Hemingway

"Never mistake motion for action."
— Ernest Hemingway

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

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."
— D.H. Lawrence

"It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about."
— L.P. Hartley

"You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about."
— Irving Berlin

"To write a good book one should feel it through, to cry with the characters and to love with them, to feel sorrow and hope."
— N. Bild