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

"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)

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

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

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

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

"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

"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

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

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

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

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"You can fix anything but a blank page."
— Nora Roberts

"I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell."
— Octavia E. Butler

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."
— Thomas Wolfe

"Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible."
— Don Roff

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

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

"A word after a word after a word is power."
— Margaret Atwood

"Writers write while dreamers procastinate. "
— Besa Kosova

"If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning..."
— Walter Mosley

"Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)"
— Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry and Other Stories)

"I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt."
— Richard Bausch

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God."
— Sidney Sheldon

"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. "
— Agatha Christie

"A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times."
— Mark Twain (Puddnhead Wilson and Other Tales : Those Extraordinary Twins, the Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg)

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
— Dr. Seuss

"Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. "
— Bill Gates

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"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

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."
— Dr. Seuss

"When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, is it not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end?"
— Stephenie Meyer

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."
— Shel Silverstein

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
— Albert Einstein

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
— e.e. cummings

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
— Douglas Adams

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
— Albert Einstein

"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You."
— Dr. Seuss (Happy Birthday to You!)

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
— John Lennon