You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
Anne Lamott
There are no shortcuts.
Bonnie Friedman
I don’t think in terms of plot very much, very little in fact, but I think that the arc of the human life is a plot and it is enough of a plot, for me.
Carol Shields
A writer needs regularity, the same books around her, the same walls. A writer needs self-ordered patterns of time, her own desk, and day after profitable day in order to do her best work.
Carol Shields Jane Austen: A Penguin Life
Moral is the process of the work itself, the creative process. What do I mean by that? I mean that a work of art is moral when you give integrity to all of the principal characters.
Charles Johnson
“A scarlet pen and a blue and gold leather-bound book – what could be more inspiring? But I seemed to get on better with a stump of pencil and Stephen’s fat, shilling exercise book ….”
Dodie Smith
I only want to write. And there’s no college for that except life.
Dodie Smith
Writing a novel is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights let you, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E.L. Doctorow
In fiction, two and two is always more than four.
Flannery O’Connor
Good prose is like a window-pane.
George Orwell
It’s an intense solitude, that only a writer can understand, and it can often be excruciating, of course, but it’s absolutely necessary.
Gwen MacEwan
Being a writer is like always having homework.
Jane Adams
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
Jessamyn West
Then one day you meet someone and the shell cracks. There is a break somewhere. A tearing. Life cracks. Inside the cracks are amazing stories.
Kristjana Gunnars
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott
The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror. At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once. At that moment time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world.
Margaret Atwood
I guess when I was younger I could work up to about 6 hours a day, sometimes, but the tension of writing, and the involvement, seems to me to be so great that after about 4 hours I am wiped out, usually. Actually, I think 3 or 4 hours at a stretch is pretty damn good. It’s the regularity of it that counts. A novel is such a long haul.
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Frank Paci, 5 September 1981
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Sally Berger
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
“Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material’. No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.”
Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm
A poet’s prose is the autobiography of ardor.
Susan Sontag
Stories have their own conclusions. Sure, you can cheat them – but if you deny a story its integrity it loses all its validity and the reader can tell.
Timothy Findley
And so, there is a way of looking – not of seeing, but of looking – that gives the writer away. The seeing – the way of seeing – is unique to every writer and cannot be told in any other way but with the pen.
Timothy Findley
Art is being rid of all preaching.
Virginia Woolf
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf