A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility…
— Susan Sontag
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
— Michael Cunningham
It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
— Neil Gaiman
Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious; not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
— Susan Sontag
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.
— Stephe King (Different Seasons)
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything.
— Susan Sontag
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
— Mark Twain
Voice boils down to a pungent roux of self, the truest expression of who we are, blended and seasoned with expertise, with our tools of choice — paint, light, lyrics, melody, choreography, chords, dialogue, sentences — whatever calls us.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…The man who never reads lives only one.
— George R. R. Martin
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
— E.M. Forster
