I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,...
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed...
Writing on dark themes is not as easy as one might think; you have to live the worst and the most terrifying nightmares, again and again, till they consume you entirely and become an inseparable part...
Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.
Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Write what should not be forgotten.
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
Never put off writing until you are better at it.
For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.