try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
– Stephen King
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
– Ernest Hemingway
It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
– Ernest Hemingway
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
– Mark Twain
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
– Somerset Maugham
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
– Herman Melville
It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C. J. Cherryh
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
– Robert Benchley
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
– Ray Bradbury
A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.
– Sidney Sheldon