"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"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

"It's only words and words are all I have to take your heart away"
— Barry Gibb

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
— Flannery O'Connor

"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE"
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huck Finn)

"Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons."
— Robertson Davies

"My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah my foes and oh my friends it shares a lovely light."
— Roald Dahl

". . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them."
— Kim Addonizio

"I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be truly disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."
— Anne Brontë

"I believe that a good children's book should appeal to all people who have not completely lost their original joy and wonder in life. The fact is that I don't make books for children at all. I make them for that part of us, of myself and of my friends, which has never changed, which is still a child."
— Leo Lionni

"Choose an author as you choose a friend."
— Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"To Live is to die,To gain is to give,Sleeping is To Dream,Power is War
and Peace is to let Go of everything in the past before your time."
— Sammy Jackson

". . . Nature pulls one way and human nature another."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"“If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what’s more is, you can take others with you!”Philip L Moore www.philiplmoore.com"
— PhilipLMoore

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."
— Eudora Welty

"When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

""I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.

"In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'

"This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.

"I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away." "
— Rukhsana Khan

"When I want to read a novel, I write one."
— Benjamin Disraeli

"Hendaklah tukang-tukang cerita waspada terhadap hal-hal bohong dan hikayat-hikayat yang menyajikan perbuatan salah, atau yang tujuan baiknya tidak dapat difahamkan oleh umum. Atau, cerita itu merupakan satu pertarungan antara yang baik dengan buruk, lalu yang buruk mendapat pembelaan yang berlebihan sebelum dikalahkan oleh yang baik. Tanpa disedari, hal ini memberanikan orang berbuat dosa (Ihya' Ulumuddin)."
— Imam Al-Ghazali

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)

"... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.

For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

[Writer's Digest, February 2009]"
— Elizabeth Sims

"What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."
— Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition)

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
— Gustave Flaubert

"It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different."
"Not a mystery."
Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."
Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing."
— Kate Morton (The House at Riverton)

"Eternal Wish ISBN 9781905809660"
— Philip L Moore

"The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg."
— Edmund Wilson

"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite."
— Edward Albee

"Fool! Nothing but black ink runs through my veins!"
— Hiromu Arakawa

"We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised."
— Pamela Glass Kelly (From Inspiration to Publication: How to Succeed as a Children's Writer: Advice from 15 Award Winning Writers)

"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
— Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)

"The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words."
— J.V. Cunningham

"An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children"
— Benjamin Disraeli