I believe the greatest pleasure in writing is in the progressive artistry of it. Each project is an attempt to do better than before - to produce a worthy work of art - something having meaning not only for the writer but also for those who may share the experience of it later. I treasure the hope of producing something that will make a difference in the world - some kind of positive change.

~ Linda Jo Martin

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

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

~ Charles Bukowski

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It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

~ Flannery O'connor

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Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

~ Flannery O'connor

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Writing is hard…It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it’s no longer a hobby, it’s no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

~ Karina Halle

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A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

~ Stephen King

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Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

~ Nora Ephron

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Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It’s amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

~ Pierce Brown

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Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

~ Gina Mcknight

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Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.

~ E. L. Tenenbaum

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I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.

~ Veronica Purcell

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Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

~ Shirley Jackson

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Your dreams don’t stop being dreams because of circumstances.

~ Jason E. Hodges

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There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.

~ Jason E. Hodges

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Time heals all wounds, some broken hearts -- and most cases of writer's block.

~ Quentin R. Bufogle

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There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

~ Fennel Hudson

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Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine’s Day.

~ Fennel Hudson

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Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

~ Fennel Hudson

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As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

~ Fennel Hudson

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Writing 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

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Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

~ Rob Bignell

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Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

~ Rob Bignell

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The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.

~ Rob Bignell

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Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

~ Don Roff

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Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

~ R.d. Ronald

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Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

~ Ron Brackin

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The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.

~ Daniel Ionson

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He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

~ Kate Dicamillo

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You will not publish 100% of the books you don’t write.

~ M. Kirin

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There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.

~ M. Kirin

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You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

~ Peter Bowen

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The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

~ Jebreel Nahaary

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The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

~ Jebreel Nahaary

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Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

~ M. Kirin

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