In the world of writing, where words weave stories and ideas take flight, inspiration is the fuel that ignites the creative process. Whether you are an aspiring novelist, a seasoned author, or someone jotting down thoughts in a personal journal, the wisdom of those who have mastered the craft can serve as both guidance and motivation. In this compilation of 131 inspiring writing craft quotes, you will find an array of perspectives that celebrate the art and discipline of writing. These quotes are not just words of encouragement, but a testament to the power of storytelling and the beauty of the written word. Join us as we delve into the insights of literary greats, discovering the enduring wisdom and passion they have shared about the craft of writing.
1. “A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual...” - Jacob Neusner
2. “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.” - C.S. Lewis
3. “You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.” - Christina Westover
4. “Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.” - Kurt Vonnegut
5. “I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.” - Pat Conroy
6. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” - Ray Bradbury
7. “I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.” - Ray Bradbury
8. “... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.” - Elizabeth Sims
9. “While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.” - Pablo Neruda
10. “Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.” - Stephen King
11. “Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.” - Bernard Cornwall
12. “Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.” - Walt Shiel
13. “I just write whenever I can.” - Elmer Kelton
14. “We're not mad. We're inhabited” - Sue Moorcroft
15. “I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.” - Nora Roberts
16. “My rule is never save bits. They get in the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.” - Gene Wolfe
17. “Part of being a writer is defending your vision and not caving in to outside pressures.” - Jennifer Crusie
18. “I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.” - Tiffany Madison
19. “So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.” - Virginia Woolf
20. “I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.” - Silas House
21. “What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.” - Sandra Brown
22. “If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.” - Linda Yezak
23. “Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.” - Kim Edwards
24. “...menulislah setiap hari, berpura-pura bahwa kau menerima gaji, berpura-pura bahwa kau harus menyerahkan sesuatu atau dipecat” - Irving Wallace
25. “Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.” - Valerie Sherwood
26. “Good fiction makes the truth believable.” - Tarrant Smith
27. “Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.” - Mickey Spillane
28. “This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.” - Patricia MacLachlan
29. “You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” - Michael Chabon
30. “Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.” - Red Haircrow
31. “Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed” - Robin Jarvis
32. “I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.” - Koren Zailckas
33. “To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.” - Graham Worthington
34. “The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable” - Jacques Barzun
35. “You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."("The Castle")” - Michael Connelly
36. “On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” - Penelope Fitzgerald
37. “If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.” - Robert McKee
38. “One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.” - Anne Lamott
39. “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
40. “I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.” - Neil Gaiman
41. “God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.” - Gerard de Marigny
42. “You don’t create a diamond by rubbing it with fluffy bunny slippers. You need to apply pressure and heat. There are enough air-headed cheerleaders out there. We need more drill sergeants.” - Julie Ann Dawson
43. “Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.” - Patricia C. Wrede
44. “The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.” - Allan Lokos
45. “And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it....It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.” - Stephen King
46. “You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare” - Erica Jong
47. “There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.” - Milton Lomask
48. “Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.” - T.L. Crain
49. “If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either” - James M. Cain
50. “It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.” - Betsy Lerner
51. “Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.” - Margaret Jean (Peggy) Langstaff
52. “What I don't write is as important as what I write.” - Jamaica Kincaid
53. “Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.” - Harold Frederic
54. “Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.” - Flannery O'Conner
55. “I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.” - Joe Coomer
56. “There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.” - Stephen Ambrose
57. “The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.” - Marcus Aurelius
58. “It's the writing that teaches you.” - Isaac Asimov
59. “Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.” - Thomas Harris
60. “You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.” - Linus Pauling
61. “grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
62. “You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.” - Rick Aster
63. “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.” - Ernest Hemingway
64. “Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.” - Heather Grace Stewart
65. “The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.” - Siri Hustvedt
66. “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
67. “There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.” - Horace Walpole
68. “A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.” - Bill Johnson
69. “I should be writing ...” - Mur Lafferty
70. “Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!” - Michael J. Sullivan
71. “I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.” - George Bernard Shaw
72. “Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!” - Monique Rockliffe
73. “Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you’ll never be published but that’s a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, ‘yes, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability’, then I’m happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I’m done, that’s jam I won’t refuse.” - Celine Kiernan
74. “Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.” - Robert B. Parker
75. “You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.” - Etienne de L'Amour
76. “...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")” - William S. Wilson
77. “Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")” - William S. Wilson
78. “You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")” - William S. Wilson
79. “I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.” - Orson Scott Card
80. “I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.” - Stephen J. Cannell
81. “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.” - George Orwell
82. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne
83. “Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.” - Ashly Lorenzana
84. “Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty” - Alison Wong, Hong Kong author
85. “Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.” - Ray Bradbury
86. “I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it’s a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it’s a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it’d freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you’re just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don’t think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.” - Tony Kushner
87. “If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.” - Pearl S. Buck
88. “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....” - Mary Shelley
89. “It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.” - Larry McMurtry
90. “Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.” - Rachelle McCalla
91. “Rakstīšana vislabāk veidoties zināmos burzmas apstākļos. Šo apgalvojumu esmu dzirdējis no tik daudziem intellektuāļiem, ka tas man jau sen ir apnicis… Saprotams, es tam neticu.” - Anšlavs Eglītis
92. “Radošs darbs nav veicams kaut kādā brīdī un pēc pavēles. Daiļnieks var strādāt tikai tad, kad jūtas aicināts! Ja vēlaties uzrakstīt kaut ko lielāku, tad jums jāiemācās iedvesmi organizēt – izsaukt pēc pavēles!… Vispirms mēģiniet ieturēt noteiktas darba stundas! Nekas tā nepalīdz kā regularitāte. Sēstieties pie galda arī tad, ja jums nepavisam negribas rakstīt! …Mēģiniet virzīt domas uz aprakstāmo tematu un piezīmējiet visu, kas šinī sakarā jums nāk prātā, lai arī sakarība liktos gluži absurda. Pēc pusstundas, ja vien jūs neesat patoloģiski izklaidīgs vai šizofrēns, jūs būsit atjaunojis kontaktu ar savu tematu un gluži nemanot iesāksit strādāt produktīvi.” - Anšlavs Eglītis
93. “...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...” - John Geddes
94. “You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.” - Lisa Cron
95. “... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...” - John Geddes
96. “...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...” - John Geddes
97. “poems are small moments of enlightenment” - Natalie Goldberg
98. “Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.” - Janet Burroway
99. “Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.” - Jessica Lave
100. “Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.” - Lisa Cron
101. “This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind.” - Davee Jones
102. “I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.” - Brad Leithauser
103. “If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.” - Arthur Plotnick
104. “Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.” - Ayn Rand
105. “Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly” - K.A.Young
106. “This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.” - Jeff Goins
107. “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” - John Edgar Wideman
108. “Der Mensch, der einen wirklich künstlerischen Eindruck empfängt, hat das Gefühl, dass er das, was ihm die Kunst enthüllt, bereits kannte, aber außer Stande war, den Ausdruck dafür zu finden.” - Leo Tolstoy
109. “All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” - Anne Lamott
110. “I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.” - P.G. Wodehouse
111. “An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.” - Chris Everheart
112. “Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.” - C. Kennedy
113. “I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie” - Carl Henegan
114. “A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.” - Roman Payne
115. “Writing is a team sport.” - Chris White
116. “No matter how entertaining, diverse, concise, or detailed, a writing craft book is, it’s not going to work magic on you, it’s not going to suddenly make you a brilliant writer simply by reading it. You need to use what you read and learn in your own writing. Because that’s when you have those AHA moments. That's when it really sticks.” - Jessica Bell
117. “Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.Play with syntax.Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.Minimum: One.Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.” - Richard Hugo
118. “All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.” - APORVAKALA
119. “Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.” - scavola
120. “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.” - Margaret Atwood
121. “However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
122. “When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.” - Donald Richie
123. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.” - Django Wylie
124. “Find the problem, find the story.” - John Brown
125. “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” - George R.R. Martin
126. “You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.” - Adair Lara
127. “But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.” - Elizabeth George
128. “I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.” - Rayne Hall
129. “Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.” - Alden Bell
130. “Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.” - Clive Barker
131. “For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited” - Virginia Woolf
