"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

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
— Maya Angelou

"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)

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

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

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"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

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

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"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

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
— Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
— Philip Pullman

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
— Dylan Thomas

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

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

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"I am at this moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it is then discovered."
— Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

"the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

"The Wine of Forever""
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

"After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?"
— Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)

"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)

"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

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
— Philip Pullman

"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"DWIGHT:

Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn.
Sometimes that means dying.
Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people."
— Frank Miller (Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill)

"The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink."
— Walter Mosley

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

"The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:

too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,

too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,

too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,

too many divorces to grant,

heirs to disinherit,

trysts to arrange,

letters to misdirect into evil hands,

innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,

women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,

men to drive to adultery and theft,

fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. "
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."
— Italo Calvino

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."
— John Berger

"Toby: Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?

Mrs. Landingham: The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you?

Toby: Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham.

Mrs. Landingham: What age would that be, Toby?

Toby: Late twenties?

Mrs. Landingham: Atta boy. "
— Aaron Sorkin

"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

"The thing I write will be the thing I write."
— Steve Shilstone

"She doesn't quite chop his head off.
She makes a Pez dispenser out of him."
— Frank Miller (Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill)

"Margaret: Can I - can I just say something for the future?

Leo: Yeah.

Margaret: I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good.

Leo: You can sign the President's name?

Margaret: Yeah.

Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?

Margaret: Yeah! Or... do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?

Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!

Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.

Leo: I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?

Margaret: It was just for fun."
— Aaron Sorkin

"Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind.
If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman. "
— Frank Miller (Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill)

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?

Sam: No.

Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent. "
— Aaron Sorkin

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
— Italo Calvino

"God pity the poor novelist."
— Steven Millhauser (Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright)

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."
— Nicholas Tucker (Philip Pullman: Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman)

"President Bartlet:

There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room."
— Aaron Sorkin