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

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

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

"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

"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

"I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."
— Philip Pullman

"The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally."
— Harlan Ellison

"Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain."
— Till Lindemann

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
— Red Smith

"Writer's block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren't serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are."
— Philip Pullman

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
— Mark Twain

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."
— Abraham Lincoln

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
— Horace Mann

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
— Garrison Keillor

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."
— Stephen King

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is."
— Allan Bloom

"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed."
— Benjamin Franklin

"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."
— John Witherspoon

"It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part."
— Voltaire

"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
— Joan Bauer

"In order to know who you are you need to know God is."
— Annette Hoggs-Jackson

"If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job."
— John Berry

"Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can."
— Gloria Mallette

"Never judge a book by its movie."
— J.W. Eagan

"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it"
— James Bryce Bryce

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
— Eugene O'Neill

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine.(Fortunately) Everybody drinks water."
— Mark Twain

"All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not."
— Nick Hornby

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."
— Stephen King

"Get busy living or get busy dying."
— Stephen King (Shawshank Redemption)

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
— Stephen King

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."
— Stephen King

"Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."
— Stephen King (On Writing)