“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway
“I would advise that anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” – Harper Lee
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” – Larry L. King
“What I don’t write is as important as what I write.” – Jamaica Kincaid
“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
“The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.” – Jo Linsdell
“If it sounds like writing, I re-write it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” – Elmore Leonard
“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
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“Write while the heat is in you….The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has been cooled to burn a hole with.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” – C.S. Lewis