1. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
–Robert Frost

2. “The material’s out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.”
–Beverly Lowry

3. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
–Peter Handke

4. “To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” —
–William Zinsser

5. “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
–Lawrence Block

6. “Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
–George Singleton

7. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
–Mark Twain

8. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
–Annie Dillard

9. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
–Maya Angelou

10. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
–Ernest Hemingway

11. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
–Toni Morrison

12. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
–Virginia Woolf

13. “I don’t write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.”
– Patricia Hampl

14. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
– Jack Kerouac

15. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
– Sylvia Plath

16. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
– Tom Clancy

17. “Writing starts with living.”
– L.L. Barkat

18. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
– Louis L’Amour

19. “Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness”
– Julia Cameron

20. “Writer’s Block is just an excuse by people who don’t write for not writing.”
–Giando Sigurani

21. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
–Frank Herbert

22. “I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.”
–François Mauriac

23. “It’s a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”
–Jeanette Winterson

24. “..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.”
–Ivan Klíma

25. “Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.”
–Ralph Keyes

26. “There is something about just setting the pen to paper that lifts me and helps to focus my energy and thoughts.”
– Susan Elaine Jenkins

27. “Turning a manuscript into a book is easy; getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.”
–A.P. Fuchs​