“Each book has to teach you how to write it.”

— Salman Rushdie

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Don’t resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.”

— Patricia Hamill

“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.”

— Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

“The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it. ”

— Vanna Bonta

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand.

— Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone

“Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared…”

— William S. Wilson 

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

— Maya Angelou

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

— Gloria Steinem

“A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.”

— Victor J. Banis

"First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!"

— Ray Bradbury

“The things you do badly are as much part of your style as the things you do well.”

—Martin Scorsese

“Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other. ”

— Nora Roberts

“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

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

— John Steinbeck

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

— Shannon Hale

“Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.”

— Iris Murdoch

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

— E.L. Doctorow

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

— Toni Morrison

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

— John Steinbeck

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."

— Herman Melville

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

— William Faulkner

"You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it."

— Octavia E. Butler

“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”

— Steven Wright

“When I am writing, I’m very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.”

— Graham Swift

“The fact is one's own voice is not heard anywhere else. It's a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.”

— Yusef Lateef

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

— Stephen King

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

— Ray Bradbury

"Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences."

— Anne McCaffrey

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”

— Milan Kundera

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

— Louis L’Amour

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer."

— Barbara Kingsolver

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s."

— Stephen King

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

— E. L. Doctorow

"Start before you’re ready."

— Steven Pressfield

"Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader."

— Joseph Joubert

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

— Victor Hugo

“An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart. ”

— Uri Shulevitz

“Keep typing until it turns into writing.”

— David Carr

“In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”

— Anton Chekhov

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

— Robert Frost

“The novel cannot submit to authority.”

— Julian Gough

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.”

— Robert McKee

“I write for the same reason I breathe — because if I didn’t, I would die.”

— Isaac Asimov

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

— Franz Kafka

“I write to discover what I know.”

— Flannery O’Connor

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

— Stephen King

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Good writing is like a windowpane.”

— George Orwell

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away. ”

— Kurt Vonnegut 

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

— Jack London

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."

— Anton Chekhov

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

— Herman Melville

“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.”

— John Banville

“My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell. ”

— Harold Ramis

"Craft is too grand and foreign a word to describe what gets done most days in your pajamas."

— Zadie Smith

“In good writing, words become one with things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

— William Faulkner

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

— Stephen King

“What I’ve learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

“Character is plot, plot is character.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“All good writing leaves something unexpressed.”

— Christian Nestell Bovee

"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

— Robert Frost

“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

— Bill Murray, The French Dispatch

“I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.”

— Charles Kuralt 

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly."

— C.J. Cherryh

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

— E. L. Doctorow

“It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

"Half my life is an act of revision."

— John Irving

"I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." 

— Shannon Hale

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

— Anton Chekhov

“The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself… alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

— William Faulkner

"Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear."

— Patricia Fuller

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

— Thomas Mann

“Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.”

— Edward Abbey

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe, which runs through himself and all things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head."

— Mike Rich

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.”

— William S. Burroughs

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

— Mark Twain

“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”

— Roald Dahl

“You can’t write differently, even if you want to. You just have to be able to notice when you are boring yourself.”

—Adam Phillips

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."

— Arthur Plotnik

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.”

— Richard Price

“I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is s—t. I’m just trying to make the best s—t I can.”

— Percival Everett

"When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest." 

— Stephen King

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

— Jack Kerouac

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.”

— Annie Proulx

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”

— Agatha Christie

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

— William H. Gass

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”

— Voltaire

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

— Isabel Allende

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

— Samuel Johnson

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

— T.S. Eliot

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”

— Anne Frank

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”

— Grace Paley

“I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was ‘not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life."

— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

— Margaret Atwood

“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.”

— Edward Abbey

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

— Doris Lessing

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

— Doris Lessing

“I always think of style as something that’s the distance between what you want something to look like, and what your hand and brain make it look like unintentionally. And there’s quite a gap there, and there’s some interesting stuff in that gap.”

— Daniel Clowes

“You never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done. That is why so many talented people stop writing. It’s hard to tolerate this not-knowing.”

— Jenny Offill

“It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much."

— Leonard Woolf

“One of my former husbands remarked that when I had a good day writing, I looked like a Catholic who had seen the pope.”

— Louise Glück

“We don’t write what we know exactly, but rather we write to know. Writing in that sense becomes better understood as a kind of prayer, a kind of inquiry, something best done over time, repetitively, day after day.”

— Anthony Doerr

“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

— Robert Frost

"…tracking truth by ear, stalking surprise, not knowing what I have to say until I’ve said it…"

— Peter Schjeldahl

“There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”

— William Faulkner

“I love when a book just starts, without any attempt to justify itself. Books should just start!”

— Elisa Gabbert

"Beginnings are such delicate times.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

“It’s clear to me now that nothing can save us from the crisis of beginning.”

— Elizabeth Cooperman

“Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin!”

— Donald Barthelme

“Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.”

— John Gregory Dunne

"The impulse is always, what do you feel most confused about and most unsure about. You can assume that others like you are having similar doubts. As I've always said, your job is to preach to the converted. That's what preachers are supposed to talk about. It's not the things we know are true, but the things were worried might not be true, that contravene our faith. That's the place to go. Anything good comes from a place of unknowing.”

— Tony Kushner

“You just got to put in the work. That’s all it is. If you watch enough Rocky movies – and there are six of them, three of them are really f—king good – anytime Rocky tried to take a shortcut in training, he got his ass whooped. And, you know, Rocky III, he’s in a nice gym and the girls are there kissing his muscles and all that bulls—t, and Mr. T beats the s—t out of him and then he has to go in the dirty gym with the black guys. There’s no shortcut.”

— Chris Rock

“Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very much doubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh.”

— Anne Frank

“Our problems remain exactly as serious throughout all of life’s stages: just barely greater than our ability to meet them, or else they wouldn’t be problems.”

— Tim Kreider

”The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

— Eden Phillpotts

“From now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world.”

— George Orwell

“Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer’s audience is always a fiction.”

— William Ong, Orality and Literary

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“When you don’t know what you’re doing, you make some wonderful mistakes.”

— Peter Hook, on New Order

“Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself…”

— Klee

“Black Rain, my first action movie, was original but only by virtue of my own stupidity. My lack of knowledge made it original.”

— Hans Zimmer

“Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.”

— William Blake

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers”

— Saul Steinberg

“You have no right to assume that you'll be able to write because you could write yesterday. On the other hand, when there are dark times, you can say, I've faced this before. You learn that you will always have to mark time, that you shouldn't rush, that if you wait, the book will come to you. But you only build up this knowledge through long experience. Your daily work is very much about the line, the paragraph. It's not about the grand design of your career.”

— Hilary Mantel

"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he set out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits…”

— Simone Weil