“A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
– Anton Chekhov

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
– Elmore Leonard

“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.”
– Groucho Marx

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“The mark of a really great writer is that he or she gives expression to what the masses of mankind think or feel without knowing it. The mediocre writer simply writes what everyone would have said.”
– G.C. Lichtenberg

“Almost anyone can become an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.”
– A.A. Milne

“People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.”
– Anna Quindlen

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
– Isaac Asimov

“What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.”
– Logan Pearsall Smith

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
– Mark Twain

“You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.”
– Maxim Gorky

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
– Jack London

“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

“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”
– Mignon McLaughlin

“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.”
– Ray Bradbury

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
– Richard Bach

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
– Rudyard Kipling

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
– Samuel Johnson

“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
– Raymond Chandler

“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.”
– Stephen Leacock

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

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
– Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.”
– Sinclair Lewis