“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.”
― Kit Reed

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

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.”
― Stephen King

“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.”H.P. Lovecraft

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“An enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.”
― Connie Brockway

They ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
William S. Burroughs

“Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”
― Victor Hugo

“Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.”
― Amit Kalantri

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. ”
― James Baldwin

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”
― Tennessee Williams

“No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“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

“After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.”
Maya Angelou

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes. ”
― William Zinsser

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.”
― Jyrki Vainonen

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”
― Raymond Chandler

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
― William Stafford

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”
― Jean M. Auel

“What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.”
― Blake Crouch

“What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.”
― Blake Crouch