“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

-E.L. Doctorow

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“The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.”

- John Updike

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“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”

-Gustave Flaubert

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“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.”

-Edward Albee

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“The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.”

- Richard Wright

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“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”

- Terry Pratchett

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“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

- George Bernard Shaw

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“If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you. “

- Dorothy Parker

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“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.“

- Erica Jong

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“Doing something does not require discipline.  It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.”

- Annie Dillard

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“The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas.”

- Raymond Chandler

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“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”

-Ernest Hemingway

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“The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer.”

- Franz Kafka

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“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”

- Thomas Hardy

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“The best style is the style you don’t notice.”

- Somerset Maugham

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“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth.”"

- Vaclav Havel

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“To hell with facts! We need stories!”

- Ken Kesey

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“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

-Christopher Hitchens

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“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

-Charles Baudelaire

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