"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."

— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America 🌺

"Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd."

— China Miville 🌺

"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying 🌺

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."

— Thomas Wolfe 🌺

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

— Robert Benchley 🌺

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

— Lois McMaster Bujold 🌺

"No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

— Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel 🌺

"To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist."

— Adrienne Rich 🌺

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."

— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 🌺

"?A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."

— Simone de Beauvoir 🌺

"Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would."

— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders 🌺

" ? ? ? ?. ? ? !"

— 🌺

"To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!"

— Lillian Cauldwell 🌺

"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

— William Faulkner 🌺

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft 🌺

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."

— Andr Breton 🌺

"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."

— Mark Twain 🌺

"First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft."

— Terry Pratchett 🌺

"[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"

— Terry Pratchett 🌺

"You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."

— Jodi Picoult 🌺