"Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
~Meg Chittenden
"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
~Anne Sexton
"Writing is a socially acceptable
form of schizophrenia."
~E.L. Doctorow
"Literature anticipates life. It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose."
~Oscar Wilde
"Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down..."
~Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty, pg. 4 of On the Road
"Writing is like prostitution: First you do it for the love of it. Then you do it for a few friends. And finally you do it for money."
~Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (a. k. a. Molière)
"Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do."
~D. H. Lawrence, "Why the Novel Matters"
"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready..."
~E. M. Forster
"Never write with your mouth full. You'll make that typo, scream about that time because you did, and fling food all over the monitor. Then you will not be happy. To remain happy and not face this problem, don't eat and write at the same time."
~Elisha Charles
"There's no better end to a play, so it's a good idea to stop there."
~Uranie
"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein."
~Walter Smith
"Writing is to thought as natural selection is to evolution."
~Conn Hallinan
"A copy of verses kept in the cabinet, and only shown to a few friends, is like a virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is like a common whore, whom anybody may purchase for half-a-crown."
~Jonathan Swift
""Being present while your story is discussed is like hearing your relatives talk
about your corpse while you listen from a corner near the ceiling."
~Michael Byers, quoted in Oberlin College's Alumni Magazine, Winter 2002-03
"The story -- from 'Rumplestiltskin' to 'War and Peace' -- is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
~Ursula K. Le Guin
"If I had more time, I would write a shorter story."
~Mark Twain
"I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'"
~Saul Bellow
"My big ambition had been to write for The New Yorker, and one day -- sheer blind luck -- I took an antihistamine and two aspirins and some zinc tablets and 5 mg of vitamin E and wrote a thousand words that they bought and published, and then the formula never worked again."
~Garrison Keillor, in The Atlantic, July/August 2003
"I could claim any number of highflown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dog behavior as submission to the alpha, or even as a moral choice. But maybe it's that they're dogs, and that's what dogs do."
~Amy Hempel
". . . To finish is sadness to a writer--a little death. He puts the last word down, and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."
~John Steinbeck
"You need many different kinds of books. People need to have different
things to read at different times in their lives."
~Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
"Contained in a blank page are a thousand thousands of possibilities."
~Anonymous
"Now that I have his ear, I will write the defining play of the twenty-first
century."
~Alan Holman, up-and-coming playwright, in reference to Henry Woolf
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