Once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ~Virginia Woolf
The one thing all nations of the earth share is the fear that a member of the family will want to be an artist. ~Robert Frost
Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you have decided to be a writer, you're a writer, published or not. ~Jerry B. Jenkins
When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you till all seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the time and the place the tide will turn. ~Harriet Beecher Stowe
Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. ~John Steinbeck
If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people. ~Dean Koontz
We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally. ~Margaret Wise Brown
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. ~Mark Twain
The road to hell is paved with adverbs. ~Stephen King
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from. ~Anne Tyler
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. ~Ernest Hemingway
Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall
The desire to write grows with writing. ~Desiderius Erasmus
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. ~Jules Renard
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ~W. Somerset Maugham
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. ~Jules Renard
Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose. ~P. G. Wodehouse
You fail only if you stop writing. ~Ray Bradbury
If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov