Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

~ Duncan B. Barlow

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Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

~ William Goldman

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Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it’s like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren’t allowed to make mistakes.

~ Karina Halle

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To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the not. If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.

~ Natasha Lester

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Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

~ Luke Taylor

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When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

~ Alvi Syahrin

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The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

~ Jonathan Maas

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Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

~ Peter Selgin

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Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

~ Christy Hall

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Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.

~ Christie Silvers

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Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write.

~ Avijeet Das

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The writing in itself is transformative for me.

~ Sophia Rose

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Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

~ Marcel Proust

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I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson Writers On Writing

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

~ Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras Writers On Writing

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

~ Joan Didion

Joan Didion Writers On Writing

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

~ Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Writers On Writing

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

~ Annie Dillard

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Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Writers On Writing

Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.

~ Arthur Freed

Arthur Freed Inspirational Writers On Writing

If you're a writer, you'll know it by the distinct feeling of only being able to breathe properly when alone with your characters. All other times, I'm panting--just pining for the next time I can be with them.

~ Karen Luellen

Karen Luellen Writers On Writing

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

~ Stephen King

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Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

~ Philip Sidney

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Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

~ William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams Writers On Writing

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

~ Steven Brust

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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

~ Virginia Woolf

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There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon Paranoia Writers On Writing

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

~ Betsy Lerner

Betsy Lerner On Writing Writers On Writing

If one can, anyone can.If two can, you can, too!

~ Nancy I. Sanders

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Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

~ Félix J. Palma

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Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

~ Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron Artists Life Writers On Writing

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

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Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...

~ Belle Whittington

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The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

~ Graham Greene

Graham Greene Writers On Writing

A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.

~ Agona Apell

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I have never known anything to be as exquisite or as excruciating as the Love-Hate relationship I have with writing.

~ Tonny K. Brown

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