"Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound

"When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation." Kenneth Koch

"Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about." Ray Bradbury

"Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day." Robert Hass

"When you go home tonight, make a list of the people who are impediments, who don't believe in you, and call them up and tell them, 'Get the hell out of my life.' You don't need them. Writing is tough enough without having people around you who contribute to a writer's insecurity." Ray Bradbury

"Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay." Ray Bradbury

"Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen." Stephen King

"You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace--an epiphany, something that comes to you." Joyce Carol Oates

"My starting point [in writing] is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. . . . I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I wish to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." George Orwell

"Get off the track consciously as often as you can" [to generate new ideas]. Chase Twichell

"Writers are like crows; they carry off what is bright and shiny, without respect for its original use or intent." Marge Piercy "A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty." Vladimir Nabokov

"Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work the critics don't like--then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." Jean Cocteau

"Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view--love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind." John Updike

"All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory--unless you're writing about typing." Joe Haldeman

"In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon." William Kittredge

On first drafts: "Lock them in a dark drawer until they reveal your heart to you." Elaine Fowler Palencia

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket." Ernest Hemingway

"Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?" William Kittredge

"We are all apprentices in a craft in which no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway

"Good prose is like a window pane." George Orwell

"The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity." Gustave Flaubert

"To the storyteller, all life is extraordinary." Harry Mark Petrakis

"Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end." Peter De Vries

"Story is the distance between problem and solution." James Plath

"Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means. You want to create a work that radiates meaning, like a bare light bulb--not one where you put a bag with pinholes over it to direct the light." William Kittredge

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing." Flannery O'Connor

"In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust." Oscar Wilde

"No 'story' is possible without its fools--as most of the fine painters of life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly felt." Henry James

". . . everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom both are minor figures." John Barth

"We continually use stories to hold up as mirrors to ourselves." William Kittredge

"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she." Anton Chekhov

"What has made [a character] this way? Figure that out, and it's a much better story than anything you can make up." Elaine Fowler Palencia

"Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11." Charles Baxter

"Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing." Ernest Hemingway

"Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball." Neil Simon

"I can't write five words but that I change seven." Dorothy Parker

"When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes." John Hersey

"No one put a gun to your head and ordered you to become a writer. One writes out of his own choice and must be prepared to take the rough spots along the road with a certain equanimity, though allowed some grinding of teeth." Stanley Ellin

John Updike called the novelist's isolation "heroic, a martyrdom. "That is, the world does not need this urgently. There has been no S.O.S. sent out saying: 'Send us a novel.' So you're doing it more or less out of kind of a sense of duty--duty to your own talent."

"You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one." Paul Theroux

"Writers aren't exactly people . . . they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Robin Williams on irresistable scripts: "I keep working because projects are interesting or very bizzare, which I like. I'm exploring, finding humanity. I'm trying to play characters that allow us to look at who and what we are as a species."

"Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance [if you have a story to tell]. The best voices are not you . . . they're a little away from you." Barry Hannah

"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." Kingsley Amis

"A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the year book of a school for exceptional children than writing novels." Ernest Hemingway

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." Flannery O'Connor

"Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper." Howard Nemerov

"If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves." Lillian Hellman