"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

"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)

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

"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

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

"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

"The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. "
— Brenda Ueland