"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
— Carl Sagan

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."
— William S. Burroughs

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."
— E.B. White (Charlotte's Web)

"It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for."
— Marcel Proust

"Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician."
— Eugène Ionesco

"He was a writer and words were his weapons."
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

"She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature--that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess."
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

"Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey."
— Marguerite Yourcenar

"I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had."
— Samuel Beckett

"I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in."
— Sylvia Plath

"A writer always writes."
— Don Roff

"You sure about this writer thing son?"
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

""Try again.
Fail Again.
Fail Better.""
— Samuel Beckett

"The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said."
— Samuel Beckett

"Do you drink?"
"Of course,I just said I was a writer."
— Stephen King

"We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it."
— Dorianne Laux (The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry)

"...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched..."
— Katherine Anne Porter

"Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. "
— Christian Bauman

"You have the power to heal your life, and you need to know that. We think so often that we are helpless, but we're not. We always have the power of our minds…Claim and consciously use your power.


"
— Louise L. Hay

"And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking.
"
— Nora Roberts

"Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Be yourself. The world worships the original."
— Jean Cocteau

"What does he mean," I asked, "the humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences?"
"You ask him," my father said. "Maybe he knows. Maybe down deep in the atom there's a little man sitting in a rocking chair reading the evening paper."
— John Updike, “The Centaur” (1963)

"I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. "
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Black Tulip)

"It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin."
— Peter Matthiessen, “The Snow Leopard” (1978)

""Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.""
— Oscar Wilde

""All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.""
— Samuel Beckett

"You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --"
— Charlotte Brontë

"One wonders what would happen in a society in which there were no rules to break. Doubtless everyone would quickly die of boredom. "
— Susan Howatch

"I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces."
— Edna O'Brien

"For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life."
— Cao Yu

"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."
— Karl Kraus

"It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. "
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

"It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character."
— Michelle Richmond

"To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you. "
— Michelle Richmond

"Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next."
— Adam Johnson

""And each one there has one thing shared;
They have sweated beneath the same sun,
Look up in wonder at the same moon,
And wept when it was all done,
For being done too soon."
"
— -- Neil Diamond.

"The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot."
— Craig Johnson (Another Man's Moccasins: A Walt Longmire Mystery)

"Only those with a conscience can find an action unconscionable."
— F.D. Crandall

"The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration."
— Adam Johnson

"THE MANY FACES OF SURVIVAL

Sunday, August 10th at 2:00 PST

Dachau Liberator, medical whistle-blower, award winning writer, college professor and world renowned garlic farmer, Chester Aaron, talks about the hard choices he’s had to make, why he made them, and how it’s changed his life.

Mr. Aaron was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, and received the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship which was chaired by Aldous Huxley and Tomas Mann. He also inspired Ralph Nader to expose the over-radiation of blacks in American hospitals.

Now Mr. Aaron is a world-renowned garlic farmer who spends his days writing about the liberation of Dachau. He is 86 years old and he has a thousand stories to tell. Although he has published over 17 books, he is still writing more and looks forward to publishing again soon.

Listen at: www.blogtalkradio.com/The-Real-Connectio...
"
— Judy Gregerson

"You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good."
— Dorianne Laux (The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry)