"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

"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)

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

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

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

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

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

"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

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"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)

"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

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

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King

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

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"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)

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

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
— Oscar Wilde

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
— Ernest Hemingway

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
— Franz Kafka

"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)

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."
— Isaac Asimov

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
— H.G. Wells

"RORSCHACH:

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there.
The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion.
There is nothing else."
— Alan Moore (Absolute Watchmen)

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living."
— Gustave Flaubert

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

"Writer speaks a stench."
— Franz Kafka

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence."
— Isadora Duncan

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
— Samuel Johnson

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

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
— Samuel Johnson

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.

"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."

"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!"
— Lewis Carroll

"He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin."
— George Orwell

"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)

"If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.
This is how we go on."
— Stephen King

"What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else."
— Nadine Gordimer

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

"If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad."
— George Gordon Byron

"Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place."
— George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
— Jack London

"In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling."
— Stephen King (On Writing)