The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

~ Ray Bradbury

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I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

~ Gertrude Stein

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As so often happens in my strange writing process, after weeks of distraction; of not thinking about the book at all; yesterday I started writing before the sun was up, or coffee was made. Whipped out a whole chapter of probably six or seven separate scenes in less than two hours. Now today, the whole story has slipped into a deeper level of knowing and connections than has (as far as I know, anyway) ever really been written about before. This is much as my experience was with Ailana, when I kept slipping into deeper and deeper gears. Bringing forth insights I myself had never learned or suspected.

~ Edward Fahey

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And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them; nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming..

~ Jo Baker

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My job as a writer is simple. Write a book I’m proud of, and present it as a gift to the world. Some will love it.Some will hate it.That’s the nature of art.

~ Kathleen Baldwin

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I have high hopes for the book and have already made a down payment on a Ferrari. Well, it’s actually a small metal model of a Ferrari, kind of like a Dinky Toy, but a little bit bigger.

~ Paul Benedetti

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Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

~ William Zinsser

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Writing is a lonely act. When two writers come together to write a horror story it can be crazy. You can't step on a mine and hope it doesn't explode.

~ Ben Oliveira

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Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room.

~ Keith Buckley

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Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

~ Abigail Thomas

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My job as a writer is simple.Write a book I’m proud of,and present it as a gift to the world.Some will love it.Some will hate it.That’s the nature of art.

~ Kathleen Baldwin

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Writers block to me is all the voices in your head trying to tune out the one voice that has something worthy say.

~ Shanet Outing

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People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work. - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments

~ Manjula Martin

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But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

~ James Baldwin

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Today is the day that you create worlds, you change lives, you make a something, a someone, out of nothing.Today is the day you become a writer.

~ Alessandra Torre

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? Reviews are for readers AND authors. It’s a good way of learning from what people think about the work. Being it good or bad. A book might as well be hurt by a bad, poorly written review. That’s such a pity. Some people don’t know how to express themselves, and maybe that’s why they are just readers and not writers, others read a book like chewing a cupcake. That’s too bad. If that was not your cup of tea, leave it there, untouched. Don’t go bash the author for that. But if you really hate the book, why bother telling others. It’s your problem after all. You can give constructive opinions but don’t blame the author for your different tastes and views. Also authors shouldn’t comment on reviews, it sounds unprofessional, even silly. Some busy writers don’t even have time to read what other people say about their work. If someone enjoyed your book, or not, that is irrelevant. If you will continue or not to write something else it doesn´t add to the plate.. Besides, why bother commenting on a review, just read it and shut up. Being it good or bad. So my opinions about authors commenting on reviews is just my opinions after all!

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

~ Haruki Murakami

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Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities.

~ Robin Sacredfire

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After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learned over the years, this ain’t so.As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier just been little more than a sequence of events.On the 3rd run through, the characters stand tall. Some break free of my earlier concepts of what they were all about, what they wanted, how they related to each other, and where they were going.From then on, THEY set the pace, and I do my best to honor them in becoming what THEY choose to be.From then on, my friends; we have a story!By the end of the 3rd draft, I have enough of an idea of where the characters are going, and how their passions empower the story, or tear it apart, that I can start cutting away, and cutting away, anything that isn’t that.Until we reach the point where there is not a single word left anywhere in the book, that isn’t a vital, dynamic, organic contributor to the living whole.

~ Edward Fahey

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The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.

~ Flannery O'connor

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Writing is like scrambling up a hill on all fours; you arrive halfway up, and you are committed - you want to reach the summit, yet you must stop, to gather your strength and will. When you have climbed to the summit, you stop, catch your breath, and take in the vista. You wonder how you made it. Then, you make your decent, somewhat subdued, all the while planning your next ascent, your next attempt to touch the sky. The memory of your climb leaves you with one impression - the idea that it gets easier, over time.

~ Suzy Davies

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The sky, with a single star, would be dark and boring. A million stars in the firmament makes for something wondrous and bright.

~ Beem Weeks

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I'm not into writing many more books or more pages. My goal is to increase the value of each sentence I write. And for that, I have to just erase my past and bring only forward what matches the new me, things I can easily rewrite and adapt to my new perspective.

~ Robin Sacredfire

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Writers cheat death by constructing an immortality vessel.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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We write because the blank piece of paper and the pen are there. We write because this is our addiction and we are proud of it. Our habit, our drug, our crutch. Whatever you wish to call it. We write because since an early age we felt it deep in our souls and in our bones. The poem must be written, the story must be told and the new myths and Gods are waiting for you to bring them forth from out of the darkness and to bring them into the light of being. You are a creator, so create. You are the writer. So write.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

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Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

~ William Zinsser

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I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.

~ William Zinsser

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The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

~ William Zinsser

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The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.

~ William Zinsser

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The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgment will be implicit, and that when we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don't live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is a Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.

~ Flannery O'connor

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There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.

~ Flannery O'connor

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The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.

~ Flannery O'connor

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The problem with taxation is that authors can't write off whiskey as a business expense.

~ Bryan Way

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Writing might never be an easy act, but with TBL, writers don’t have to go at it alone.

~ Tethered By Letters

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The personal eloquence of other people expressing aspects of nature and human condition inspire us, as do persons whom exhibit courage to gain strength when dealing with the hardships and struggles of a mortal life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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If you want to be a good writer, internalize the good writers; absorb them; integrate with their souls; embrace their minds; mingle with their life stories; in short, merge with them, lose yourself in them!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

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An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing’s tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight’s powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer’s imagination.

~ Pat Conroy

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Whatever good and beautiful experience you are having, if you are not writing them down, you are wasting them! Your thoughts on the paper are your real reality because the realities of the experience quickly disappear, they are already gone, they are dead, but the written thoughts of your experiences are still alive and can live thousands of years! Sit down and write them down!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

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When she was chair of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, Daisy Goodwin wrote a controversial essay lamenting the 'unrelenting grimness' of so many novels and pointing out that 'generally great fiction contains light and shade'---not only misery but joy and humor. 'It is time for publishers to stop treating literary fiction as the novelistic equivalent of cod-liver oil: if it's nasty it must be good for you.

~ Daisy Goodwin

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