“Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.” ― Anne Sexton

“Can you imagine what it was like to write in a library, where you could run upstairs and feel the ambiance of your loved writers, and take books off the shelf and discover things that you might want to put in your book as a quote, and then run back down and finish writing another page.”Ray Bradbury

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good” ― Thornton Wilder

“CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. JOEL: I know. CLEMENTINE: What do we do? JOEL: Enjoy it.” ― Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

“...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.” ― Angelica Banks

“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

“There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.” ― Diane Duane

“There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.” ― H.L. Mencken

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of a knight on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.” Ezra Pound

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” ― Marcel Proust

“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” ― Truman Capote

“Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing” Guy De Maupassant

“You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.” ― Jessica Mitford

“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.” ― Honoré de Balzac

“...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.” ― Angelica Banks

“That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.” ― Kelly Barnhill

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." ― John Irving

“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.” Ann Patchett,

"A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

“...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;” ― James M. Cain, The Butterfly

“Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.” Chuck Palahniuk

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.” ― Alfred Hitchcock

“If you love a writer, leave her alone.” ― Tarang Sinha

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

“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.” ― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

Cram your head with characters and stories. Never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working.Tell them it's research.Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone. Jennifer Weiner

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.” ― Vladimir Nabokov

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.” ― Clarice Lispector

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

To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I've sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.Robert Ludlum

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” ― William Faulkner

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.” Albert Camus

“To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.” ― Ray Bradbury

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Thousands of us published in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong.” ― Leo Tolstoy

“I had no expectation that the novel would be published, because it was a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. ” Don DeLillo

“The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?” ― George Saunders

“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.” ― Joseph Joubert

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good” ― Thornton Wilder

“...It didn't seem to her that she made the little words up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.” Elizabeth Goudge

“Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.” ― Stephanie Connolly

“I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. I loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.” Rita Dove

“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ” ― Charles Baxter

“To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. ” ― Jennifer Salaiz

“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

“Every profound literary work is a bridge between what we are and what we may become, not just as individuals, but as a collective conscience.” ― Alok Mishra

“... 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.” ― Elizabeth Sims

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

“Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.” ― Nick Hornby

“Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?” ― David Mamet