“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” -Stephen King
“Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe.”
-Dan Pink
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
-Thomas Mann
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
“In short, you may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day — yes, while you sleep — but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”
-John McPhee
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
-E. L. Doctorow
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
-Elmore Leonard
“Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”
-Austin Kleon
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
-André Gide
“Reading good nonfiction is an opportunity “to watch somebody reasonably bright, but also reasonably average, pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”
-David Foster Wallace
