"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
Mark Twain

"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing."
Oscar Wilde

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
W. Somerset Maugham

"There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art."
Lawrence Watt-Evans

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
E.L. Doctorow

"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."
Kahlil Gibran

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
E.L. Doctorow

"Art is not a handicraft.  It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced."
Leo Tolstoy

"He is able who thinks he is able."
Buddha

"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment."
Baltasar Gracian

"Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer."
John O'Hara

"Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it—and yourself."
Rosemary Daniell

"If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies."
Allan W. Eckert

"Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while."
David Eddings

"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
William Faulkner

"I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell."
Louis L'Amour

"Write what you care about and understand. Writers should never try to outguess the marketplace in search of a salable idea; the simple truth is that all good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that people like you will enjoy."
Richard North Patterson

"Never save anything for your next book, because that possible creation may not be properly shaped to hold the thoughts you're working with today. In fiction especially, anything that could happen, should happen."
Tam Mossman

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."
Kurt Vonnegut

"I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there."
H.G. Wells

"Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse."
Marianne Williamson

"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be."
Doris Lessing

"The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story—and then your story!"
Ford Madox Ford

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
Ezra Pound

"I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat."
Robertson Davies

"Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues—which takes years."
Alex Haley

"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea."
Thomas Mann

"The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense."
Tom Clancy

"If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit."
Stephen King

"For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity."
George Orwell

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."
Barbara Kingsolver

"However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once."
Jean Jacques Rousseau

"A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments."
Joyce Cary

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
Robert Frost

"To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose."
Eudora Welty

"No, it's not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside."
Stephen King

"You ask for the distinction between 'Editor' and 'Publisher': an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors."
Max Schuster

"Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge."
H.G. Wells

"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like."
Phyllis A. Whitney