137 Authors' Inspirational Quotes

In a world where words hold the power to inspire and uplift, the wisdom of great authors often serves as a beacon of hope and motivation. Whether you've faced moments of doubt, sought clarity, or simply needed a dose of inspiration, there's something profoundly impactful about the penned thoughts of literary legends. Embark on a journey through a handpicked selection of the top 137 authors' inspirational quotes, each carefully curated to ignite your spirit and awaken your inner strength. These timeless nuggets of wisdom not only reflect the depth of human experience but also encourage us to dream bigger, strive harder, and believe unwaveringly in the beauty of our own potential.

1. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” - Thomas Mann

2. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” - J.D. Salinger

3. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” - Ernest Hemingway

4. “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

6. “There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” - Margaret Atwood

7. “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” - Flannery O'Connor

8. “As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.” - John Steinbeck

9. “I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.” - Louisa May Alcott

10. “My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.” - Wodehouse

11. “When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.” - Mary Lascelles

12. “. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.” - Kim Addonizio

13. “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE” - Mark Twain

14. “Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.” - Dodie Smith

15. “We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.” - Junot Diaz

16. “I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.” - Rukhsana Khan

17. “Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.” - Robertson Davies

18. “When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

19. “All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.” - P.D. James

20. “I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)” - Jack McClelland

21. “The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.” - Benny Bellamacina

22. “If you are working with authors, you are accepting a great responsibility and must tread very carefully. The author's work is a part of herself, a creative endeavor she has poured her heart and soul into. Protecting and nurturing that work and the author is part of the job of a publisher.” - Terena Scott

23. “Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

24. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” - Dorothy Parker

25. “... 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

26. “The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten.” - Roman Payne

27. “Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.” - Jennifer Salaiz

28. “No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.” - Bohumil Hrabal

29. “Books are for nothing but to inspire” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

30. “Hendaklah tukang-tukang cerita waspada terhadap hal-hal bohong dan hikayat-hikayat yang menyajikan perbuatan salah, atau yang tujuan baiknya tidak dapat difahamkan oleh umum. Atau, cerita itu merupakan satu pertarungan antara yang baik dengan buruk, lalu yang buruk mendapat pembelaan yang berlebihan sebelum dikalahkan oleh yang baik. Tanpa disedari, hal ini memberanikan orang berbuat dosa (Ihya' Ulumuddin).” - Imam Al- Ghazali

31. “[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!” - Terry Pratchett

32. “It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.” - Kate Morton

33. “The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.” - Julian Barnes

34. “Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.” - Donald Miller

35. “The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.” - W. Somerset Maugham

36. “When I want to read a novel, I write one.” - Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” - Virginia Woolf

38. “The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.” - J.V. Cunningham

39. “A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

40. “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingway” - William Faulkner

41. “Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.” - Edward Albee

42. “To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.” - David Gerrold

43. “Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications” - Linda F. Radke

44. “The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

45. “If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what’s more is, you can take others with you!” - Philip L. Moore

46. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William WordsworthBeing an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Graycie Harmon” - L.A. Dale

47. “Fool! Nothing but black ink runs through my veins!” - Hiromu Arakawa

48. “We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they'll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we've promised.” - Pamela Glass Kelly

49. “Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.” - Christopher Hopper

50. “And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.” - Andrew Clements

51. “You can, of course, write to inspire others… but most importantly, you must write to inspire yourself.” - Jessica Swan

52. “I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.” - Doris Lessing

53. “One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?” - Alain De Botton

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

55. “I write to believe in goodness.” - Red Haircrow

56. “I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.” - Julie Ann Dawson

57. “Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.” - Dan Brown

58. “What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.” - Jaron Lanier

59. “The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” - Jaron Lanier

60. “Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.” - Shannon Alder

61. “Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one. “Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper. The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes. “You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. “Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.” “I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.” “So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?” “Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?” Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock. “He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor. “Who is he?” “A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.” - Jeff Phillips

62. “There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!” - Philip Larkin

63. “It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.” - P.G. Wodehouse

64. “And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.” - Jennifer Donnelly

65. “Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

66. “An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.” - George Bernard Shaw

67. “Authors, reviews are not for you. They are not for you. Authors, reviews are not for you.” - Stacia Kane

68. “Big writers become a kind of shared climate.” - Adam Gopnik

69. “As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.” - Miguel Serrano

70. “I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.” - Joe Hill

71. “On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review--as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.” - Arthur Miller

72. “The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.” - John Lanchester

73. “Readers have the right to say whatever the fuck they want about a book. Period. They have that right. If they hate the book because the MC says the word “delicious” and the reader believes it’s the Devil’s word and only evil people use it, they can shout from the rooftops “This book is shit and don’t read it” if they want. If they want to write a review entirely about how much they hate the cover, they can if they want. If they want to make their review all about how their dog Foot Foot especially loved to pee on that particular book, they can."[Blog entry, January 9, 2012]” - Stacia Kane

74. “Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.” - David A. Santos

75. “Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.” - Dan Brown

76. “Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.” - Mary O'Hara

77. “All trademarks, company names, registered names, products, characters, mottos, logos, jingles and catchphrases used or cited in this work are the property of their respective owners and have only been mentioned and or used as cultural references to enhance the narrative and in no way were used to disparage or harm the owners and their companies. It is the author's sincerest wish the owners of the cited trademarks, company names, etc. appreciate the success they have achieved in making their products household names and appreciate the free plug.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

78. “At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.” - Benjamin J. Carey

79. “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)” - Mary McCarthy

80. “There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.” - Jo Linsdell

81. “There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.” - E.B. White

82. “Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

83. “It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.” - Italo Calvino

84. “I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts.  It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

85. “You can never kill the spirit of an artist. They will always rewrite their resurrection and paint an eternal sunset with a blaze of orange that no one has seen before.” - Shannon L. Alder

86. “Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you're just ready to get that baby out!” - Carmen DeSousa

87. “The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.” - Kellie Elmore

88. “There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.” - Ian McEwan

89. “I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.” - Walter Farley

90. “Never give up, Never surrender!!!!! If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins” - Paula V. Hardin

91. “ATTENTION ALL AUTHORS: Be very careful who you give acknowledgement to in your books. Reason: That acknowledgement is in permanent, ink and they are forever associated with you, that book and your name. -Word to the Wi” - Anita R. Sneed-Carter

92. “Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” - Arundhati Roy

93. “I'm often asked which author I am most inspired by, but I'm inspired by all authors. It takes a great deal of courage to pour your onto paper and watch silently as the world judges it loudly.” - Charity Parkerson

94. “Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.” - Meagan Spooner

95. “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” - Peter S. Beagle

96. “When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.” - Salman Rushdie

97. “Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.” - Shannon L. Alder

98. “Where do storytellers find the wisdom to discover their own stories? From no place more mysterious than their own hearts.” - Marion Dane Bauer

99. “I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.” - Graham Greene

100. “I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.” - Shannon A Thompson

101. “It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.” - Seeley James

102. “Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

103. “We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.” - Teresa Mummert

104. “Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.” - Rachel Hartman

105. “I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer.” - Tom Conrad

106. “I love words.  I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail.  I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum.  I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over.   In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

107. “I write because writing is power. Writing is creation. When you write, you are as a god, a deity wielding his pen like some Harry Potter staff, making whatever you want to happen, happen. By sheer force of will and some clever word placement, I can arrange all of these little symbols together to invoke emotions and ideas at a whim out of whosoever allows me to cast my spell. It does not take a man and a woman to create. It just takes a writer.” - Jonathan Culver

108. “i want to bleed ink and shit prose.” - Jonathan Culver

109. “i want to never settle for anything less than my soul on paper.” - Jonathan Culver

110. “People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.” - Sara Levine

111. “I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.” - E. Nesbit

112. “Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.” - Dr Roopleen

113. “An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.” - Sterling Lord

114. “An author simply comes up with a hypothetical question, and then spends eight months and 80 thousands words to come up with a believable lie to answer it” - Carl Henegan

115. “An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s voice resonated in the reader’s head with the same words that had resonated in his own as he wrote them. He spoke to the reader from the past. What he had witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered would live forever. You only had to turn a page to travel in time.” - Stephen Parrish

116. “In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.” - John Green

117. “To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

118. “What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.” - Julie Wright

119. “...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.” - Stephen King

120. “Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft. Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

121. “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

122. “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?” - E.A. Bucchianeri

123. “I'm not stupid and I'm not brainy. I just lack execution sometimes. I'm more of a "I should have said that" kind of gal. But there will be other days when I'll have a comback that'll knock ya flat and you knows it brov! ha-ha!” - Ellie Williams

124. “For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.” - Shandy L. Kurth

125. “The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

126. “Words raced thru his mind and his fingers ached to capture them all on paper.” - Eveli Acosta

127. “You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.” - John Fowles

128. “Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.” - Eveli Acosta

129. “I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.” - George R.R. Martin

130. “The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.” - Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

131. “I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.” - Neil Gaiman

132. “There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.” - Carol Morgan

133. “Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.” - Agatha Christie

134. “The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us” - Charles Bukowski

135. “Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.” - Carl Henegan

136. “The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)” - John Gardner

137. “all that really matters to me is that there are critics.” - Peter Davis