Hans Christian Andersen

“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”

Harlan Ellison

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

Harper Lee (with Truman Capote)

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Since I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times — once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish — once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples — once to see a book man…then to nurse the baby — then into the kitchen to make chowder for dinner and now I am at it again for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write — it is rowing against wind and tide.”

Heinrich Böll

“It’s true and it’s easily said that language is material, and something does materialize as one writes.”

Henry Miller

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

H. L. Mencken

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Hunter S. Thompson

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Ian Fleming

“Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

J. D. Salinger

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

Jack Kerouac

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

Jack London

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Jackie Kennedy

“The deep desire to inspire people, to take an active part in the life of the country… We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see and not just complain about them.”

James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

James Patterson

“In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.”

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne

“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… We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

John Cheever

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”

John F. Kennedy

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

John Fante

“For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself.”

John Steinbeck

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

John Updike

“You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

Joseph Brodsky

“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.”

J. R. R. Tolkien

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Karen Blixen

“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”

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Katherine Anne Porter

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”

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Leo Tolstoy

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Louisa May Alcott

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

Margaret Mitchell

“The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.”

Mark Twain

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very.’ Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Marlon Brando

“Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.”

Max Frisch

“It’s precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

Michel Foucault

“My job is making windows where there were once walls.”

Mickey Spillane

“If you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.”

Neil Gaiman

“A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”

Nigella Lawson

“It’s true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation.”

Oliver Sacks

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”

Orson Welles

“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

Patricia Highsmith

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

P. G. Wodehouse

“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”

Philip Pullman

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”

Philip Roth

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“An artist, if he’s unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.”

Ramón Gómez de la Serna

“Writing is that they let you cry and laugh alone.”

Ray Bradbury

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things…. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

Raymond Carver

“You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

Roald Dahl

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”

Robert Frost

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

Roberto Calasso

“Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.”

Rudyard Kipling

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”

Saul Bellow

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”

Shuzo Takiguchi

“Now the globe suffers from severe nostalgia…”

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Simone de Beauvoir

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

Somerset Maugham

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Stephen King

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

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Susan Sontag

“My library is an archive of longings.”

Sylvia Plath

“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”

Ted Kooser

“Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.”

Tennessee Williams

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.”

Theodore Roosevelt

“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”

Truman Capote

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

T.S. Eliot

“There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands,

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

Vera and Vladimir Nabokov

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

Virginia Woolf

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

W. Somerset Maugham

(I know I already shared a WSM pic, but I couldn’t resist the dog!)

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

Wallace Stegner

“Hard writing makes easy reading.”

Walt Whitman

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment — to put things down without deliberation — without worrying about their style — without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote — wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

William F. Buckley Jr.

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

William S. Burroughs

“Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.”

Winston Churchill

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

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