“My goal, which isn’t always successful, is to try to take the training wheels off of essays, because I tend to have a roundabout way of getting to things.”— Sloane Crosley, hazlitt.net
“If there was an apocalypse—zombies, the sun explodes, whatever—fiction writing as a job would be the thousandth priority behind SoulCycle instructors.”— Mary H.K. Choi, amazon.com
“A character that scares you is worth exploring. Yet if you breathe life into a character and it comes to you too easily—say you’re writing from the viewpoint of a black man in America and you’re not one? Think hard about where your inspiration is coming from. Are you writing stereotypes? Tropes? Are…”— Mary H.K. Choi, amazon.com
“What I long for is a 10,000-foot view, someone with Didion’s detached, rational perspective, able to make connections and put seemingly random developments into the larger context of where we’re heading as a nation.”— Tracy Mayor, wbur.org
“Google 'How to Become a Writer' and you will get 360 million hits, and none of them will be useful.”— Harrison Scott Key, oxfordamerican.org
“The more negatively I reacted to my negative feelings, the greater the likelihood I would be starting to set the stage for a neurotic pattern. Imagine, for example, if I hated the feelings and the event so much that I hated myself for causing them. Or if I hated the girls with thoughts like, 'All gi…”— Gregg Henriques, psychologytoday.com
“I’m mostly sad that I listened — and continue to listen — to the loudest voice inside my head, the one that constantly whispers, You can’t be both successful and happy. So choose happy. That voice means well, I like her, but recently I’ve wondered if she might be wrong.”— Alyssa Shelasky, lennyletter.com
“Now, before we begin, I must admit … I am part of the problem. I often write headlines tailored to get you to click. Why? Because I’m not a big enough deal to rest on my 'personal brand.'”— John Gorman, psiloveyou.xyz
“Working for yourself may mean you have more time to do what you love at your own discretion, but it doesn’t mean you’re exempt from caring about other people’s opinions of what you do.”— Brianna Wiest, forbes.com
“Also, 50 isn't old. 60 isn't old. THERE IS NO EXPIRATION DATE WITH WRITING. Literally, you can do this job until the day you die. So why are people fixating on getting it done before 30? Who started this myth that you have to?”— Susan Dennard, twitter.com
“I tell my students that life’s biggest moments — car accidents, graduations, even deaths — may not be the best fodder for their writing. I tell them the most significant moments happen on a random Tuesday.”— Kathleen Volk Miller, nytimes.com
“I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it's about to end. And if you're never going to see someone again, it'll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, 'It was nice to hav…”— Iain Thomas, iwrotethisforyou.me
“Art for the artist, is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“This descent to the dark powers, this unbinding of spirits by nature bound, dubious embraces and whatever else may go on below, of which one no longer knows anything above ground. . . . It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whirring around oneself or even around someone el…”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, 'He looked out of the window,' it already has perfection.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“How everything can be said, how far everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“Writers aren’t (always) creating Easter egg hunts for readers, hiding references for them to find. But generally, you can assume that if you DO find something, it was put there on purpose for you.”— Celeste Ng, twitter.com