I 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
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
- Henry David Thoreau
If you have other things in your life—family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
- David Brin
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
- Anton Chekhov
