122 Writing Inspiration Quotes

In the journey of writing, whether you are a seasoned author or a budding wordsmith, moments of inspiration can be elusive. Often, it’s the right words from those who have walked the path before us that reignite our creative spark. In this collection, we have meticulously gathered 122 of the most powerful and uplifting writing inspiration quotes. These pearls of wisdom, drawn from celebrated writers, poets, and thinkers, offer not just motivation but also profound insights into the art and craft of writing. Dive in, and let these quotes inspire you to put pen to paper with renewed enthusiasm and creativity.

1. “The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.” - Walter Mosley

2. “Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman. ” - Frank Miller

3. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” - Douglas Adams

4. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” - Henry David Thoreau

5. “One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.” - Michael Cunningham

6. “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.” - Aldous Huxley

7. “...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.” - Alasdair Gray

8. “You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.” - Patricia Hampl

9. “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” - Ernest Hemingway

10. “I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.” - Horace Greeley

11. “I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.” - T.C. Boyle

12. “Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there.” - Jef Mallett

13. “It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.” - Ariel Gore

14. “What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.” - Nadine Gordimer

15. “The first draft of anything is shit.” - Ernest Hemingway

16. “Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.” - Joseph Campbell

17. “I write to find out what I'm talking about.” - Edward Albee

18. “Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.” - Toni Morrison

19. “If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” - Stephen King

20. “No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.” - Muriel Rukeyser

21. “The novel cannot submit to authority.” - Julian Gough

22. “The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.” - Leo Tolstoy

23. “All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” - Michael Chabon

24. “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” - Franz Kafka

25. “I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

26. “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.” - Anne Lamott

27. “My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.” - Cormac McCarthy

28. “this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

29. “Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.” - Dorothy Day

30. “A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.” - M.F.K. Fisher

31. “A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.” - Friedrich Dürrenmatt

32. “Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.” - Raymond Chandler

33. “So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.” - Stephen King

34. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” - Tim O'Brien

35. “(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.” - Sean O'Faolain

36. “It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise ” - John Cleese

37. “Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. ” - James Richardson

38. “Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” - Terry Pratchett

39. “No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it” - Karl Popper

40. “I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.” - Sarah Harrison

41. “The story is always better than your ability to write it.” - Robin McKinley

42. “Ron Carlson says, 'The most undervalued craft device that fiction writers need is empathy. You need to be able to actually imagine what your characters are going through. You've got to stay close. When you're in a story and dealing with people you're not certain of, or you've just come to meet because they've stepped into your story, it's very important to go slow and sit in their chair.' As Carlson also says, you don't have to love the people or the characters you write about, but they should be at least as smart as you. Look beyond stereotypes.” - Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

43. “When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather your own thoughts, write down ideas, observe people around you, and reflect on experiences. Working doesn't always mean putting words on paper.” - Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

44. “Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.” - Jennifer Murgia

45. “She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.” - Cynthia Voigt

46. “A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.” - Henry David Thoreau

47. “...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?” - Brenda Ueland

48. “I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.” - Alice Munro

49. “I write out of revenge.” - William Goldman

50. “Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.” - George R.R. Martin

51. “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” - Edgar Allan Poe

52. “Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.” - Gloria Anzaldua

53. “Sometimes the things in our heads are far worse than anything they could put in books or on film!!” - CK Webb

54. “There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again.” - Caris O'Malley

55. “...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.” - Javier Marias Franco

56. “I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.” - Jeanne Voelker

57. “It's wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you throw the old writing on the floor and stomp on it, remember to celebrate those seeds of genius and be glad that you're still writing.” - Jeanne Voelker

58. “If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good” - Thornton Wilder

59. “Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.” - Anais Nin

60. “You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.” - Charles Yu

61. “In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” - Rose Tremain

62. “There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.” - Aaron Allston

63. “‎"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing” - Mariam Kobras

64. “If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest.” - T.F. Hodge

65. “Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.' 'How awful.' ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

66. “To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.” - Roland Barthes

67. “It's a finger snapping kind of day.” - Jamie Weise

68. “You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.” - Sandra Brown

69. “Sevgilim! (…) Cıgara içmekten vazgeçilebilir mi? Hikâye yazmaktan da, körolası, vazgeçemiyoruz. İşte bir müddettir ben de, elimde cıgara, adam arıyor gibiyim. Ne kadar üstü başı düzgünler, suratı ciddiler, hali azametliler içinde kalmışım ki bir türlü hikâyeme yanaşamıyorum.” - Sait Faik Abasıyanık

70. “Writing is hard work, not magic. It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for. What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it? What do you want to get out of it. It's also about making a serious time commitment and getting the project done.” - Suze Orman

71. “Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.Seth Godin” - Seth Godin

72. “In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.” - Elizabeth Hardwick

73. “Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.” - Charles Yu

74. “In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.” - Brenda Ueland

75. “It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.” - Charles Dickens

76. “I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.” - Edward Abbey

77. “The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.” - Aberjhani

78. “You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.” - John Green

79. “When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.” - Charles Bukowski

80. “I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!” - Ashly Lorenzana

81. “If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World.” - Patrick Nowell-Smith

82. “Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.” - Joseph Campbell

83. “Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

84. “As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.” - Orson Scott Card

85. “Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.” - Derek Raymond

86. “For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?” - W.G. Sebald

87. “Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.” - Cheryl Strayed

88. “She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.” - Ayn Rand

89. “As soon as you start writing, even if it is under your real name, you start to function as somebody slightly different, as a "writer". You establish from yourself to yourself continuities and a level of coherence which is not quite the same as your real life... All this ends up constituting a kind of neo-identity which is not identical to your identity as a citizen or your social identity, Besides you know this very well, since you want to protect your private life.” - Michel Foucault

90. “My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter.” - Gary Reilly

91. “I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?” - Ray Bradbury

92. “Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” - Ray Bradbury

93. “There's something intimidating, yet exciting about a blank page.” - Chris Stocking

94. “What would life be like without her writing? Writing filled her life with beauty and mystery, gave it life...and promise.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

95. “Wrote my way out of the hood...thought my way out of poverty! Don't tell me that knowledge isn't power. Education changes everything.” - Brandi L. Bates

96. “In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and politics converge, to touch upon that 'what' and that 'who.' At that touch, one finds the unlimited boundaries of man, concealed by words.” - Duo Duo

97. “Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it... the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing the voices in your head became a permanent fixture :) ... oh, missed one out - You sleep it!” - Patti Roberts

98. “The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice.” - Dave Gibbons

99. “It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.” - Ann Patchett

100. “The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.” - Ann Patchett

101. “It’s up to the writer and the artist to give voice to these people. There are two impulses in art: one is rebellious and transgressive—you explore regions in which you are not wanted, and you will be punished for that. But the other is a way of sympathy—evoking sympathy for people who may be different from us—whom we don’t know. Art is a way of breaking down the barriers between people—these two seemingly antithetical impulses toward rebellion and toward sympathy come together in art.” - Joyce Carol Oates

102. “A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

103. “Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” - Nora Ephron

104. “Wait, that’s your idea? That’s your expert advice? You’re going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You’re going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted that pep talk, they could just hang out inside a mall elevator.” - Karen Russell

105. “[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.” - Félix J. Palma

106. “I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .” - Clive Barker

107. “I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop

108. “We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

109. “Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.” - MacDonald Harris

110. “Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.” - Ben Hecht

111. “This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")” - Francis M. Nevins Jr.

112. “It is not a bad idea to get into the habbit of writing one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.” - Isabel Colegate

113. “There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.” - Diva Jefferson

114. “I love the word 'fantasy'... but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read.” - Neil Gaiman

115. “To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.” - D.A. Botta

116. “Your moustache,” I continue. “It’s kind of like me wanting to be a writer. It’s part of me. I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t want to be a writer.” - Candace Bushnell

117. “I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book.” - Catherine Jones

118. “I think I've been very lucky. The readers who write to me say they like the characters and the sense of a real world, often one they don't otherwise know about. And usually there's a funny bit in there somewhere.” - Sophie Weston

119. “Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.” - Deana J. Driver

120. “The first goal to be able to divide my life between two lovely places, an island off the coast of France and a village surrounded by Spanish mountains has been achieved.” - Anne Weale

121. “I get my heroes so that they're lean and hard muscled and mocking and sardonic and tough and tigerish and single, of course. Oh and they've got to be rich and then I make it that they're only cynical and smooth on the surface. But underneath they're well, you know, sort of lost and lonely. In need of love but, when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency. Most of my heroes, well all of them really, are like that. They frighten but fascinate. They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it's dangerous to be alone in the room with.” - Violet Winspear

122. “It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!” - Edith Schaeffer