“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
— Jack Kerouac
“You’ve got to stand being bad if you wanna be a writer, because if you don’t, you’re never going to write anything good.”
— David Mamet
“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”
— Peter De Vries
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
— James Michener
“But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master–something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.”
— Charlotte Brontë
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck
“Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you’ll never write a line.”
— Erica Jong
“[Where ideas come from?] My standard answer is ‘I don’t know where they come from, but I know where they come to, they come to my desk.’ If I’m not there, they go away again, so you’ve got to sit and think.”
— Philip Pullman
“Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
— Stephen King
“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
— David Foster Wallace
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
— Somerset Maugham
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
— Aldous Huxley