Writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn’t have started out thinking. Writing is, in fact, a transaction with words whereby you free yourself from what you presently think, feel, and perceive.

--Peter Elbow

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. --Robert Cormier

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It’s a kind of trick of mind and he is born with it.

--Morley Callaghan

I think that a writer’s signature should be on his work, just like a composer’s signature should be on his work. If you hear a few bars of Mozart, you don’t need to hear too much to know who wrote that music; and I’d like to think that you could pick up a story by me and read a few sentences or a paragraph, without seeing the name, and know it was my story.

--Raymond Carver

The most difficult task for a writer is to get the right voice for his material; by voice I mean the overall impression one has of the creator behind what he creates.

--John Fowles

The voice is the element over which you have no control: it’s the sound of the person behind the work.

--John Hersey

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

--Lillian Hellman

I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

--Vladimir Nabokov

It may be lousy stuff. But it is there, and I can make it better tomorrow. I have done something worthwhile with my day.

--Richard Marius

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

--Louis L’Amour

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit-detector. --Ernest Hemingway

A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found out what is true, to project it in such as way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.

--Ernest Hemingway

I write to find out what I am thinking about.--Edward Albee

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

--Joan Didion

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.

--Flannery O’Connor

That could almost be cited as the definition of a poet: Someone who notices and is enormously taken by things that somebody else would walk by.

--James Dickey

I write for me. For the audience of me. If other people come along for the ride, then it’s great.

--Edward Albee

First, I write for myself. I want to solve something, a problem; I do that best by writing a story.

--Virginia Hamilton

When I’m writing I’m always aware that this friend is going to like this, or another friend is going to like that paragraph or chapter, always thinking of specific people. In the end all books are written for your friends.

--Gabriel García Márquez

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

--Marianne Moore

I don’t think about audience at all. I think about a story. I am my own first reader, and pleasing me is a hard job. If a story doesn’t satisfy me, I have a good friend under my desk: the wastepaper basket.

--Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you work only three to five hours a day, you become quite productive. It’s the steadiness that counts.

--Woody Allen

I have to write every day because, the way I work, the writing generates the writing.

--E.L. Doctorow

By writing much one learns to write well.--Robert Southey

All my life I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

--Gabriel García Márquez

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.--Bernard Malamud

Don’t get it right. Get it written.--James Thurber

The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?

--Margaret Atwood

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time, as I’ve learned over and over again. You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

--Joyce Carol Oates

I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance…. One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldnt have standards that inhibit you from writing.

--William Stafford

The point of a notebook is to jump-start the mind.

--John Gregory Dunne

Write what makes you happy.--O. Henry

The role autobiography plays in fiction is precisely the role that reality plays in a dream. As you dream your ship, you perhaps know the boat, but you’re going towards a coast that is quite strange; you’re wearing strange clothes, the language that is being spoken around you is a language you don’t understand, but the woman on the left is your wife.

--John Cheever

I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

--E.L. Doctorow

Writing is hard work that follows no form. The stories and thoughts carry the writer along if she is astute enough to hear them and disciplined enough to follow them.

--Cynthia D. Urbanski

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan—that is the rule.

--John Fowles

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.

--Robert Frost

Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself.

--Lewis Carroll

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

--William Faulkner

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write, and keep on writing.--Ken McLeod

To survive, you must tell stories.--Umberto Eco

This business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself, how alive am I willing to be?--Anne Lamont

What exactly is “internal dialogue”? Talking to yourself. Inner speech. Subvocal speech, which actually involves movement of the vocal chords. For some reason or other, it is very hard to stop the internal dialogue. Try it. As soon as you try it you realize how difficult it is to beat. When you try to stop it, you find that it’s not you thinking the thoughts; you’re being thought. --William Burroughs

I never wrote a word that I didn’t hear as I read.--Eudora Welty

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy. --Neil Gaiman

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I’m doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. -- Jamacia Kincaid

"All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out. --Walter Mosley

Advice for aspiring writers?Nine words: read, read, read; write, write, write; edit, edit, edit. Without reading wide and deep, without reading carefully as a writer, looking for techniques to learn, without practicing regularly and pushing oneself to be the absolute best one can be, and without revising ruthlessly, one cannot become a good writer.  -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I need to write what comes to me, as this particular person—and if I am patient enough, and if I meditate enough, and if I take enough long walks, and if I just do nothing but basically stay open, that the genre actually will form itself to suit whatever the subject is that arrives. -- Alice Walker