“They are tangled children, trying to make their way in spite of the handicaps you have imposed on them.”— John Macdonald, amazon.com
“You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people.”— John Macdonald, amazon.com
“I am often given the big smiling handshake at parties (which I avoid attending whenever possible) by someone who then, with an air of gleeful conspiracy, will say, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to write.’ I used to try to be polite. These days I reply with the same jubilant excitement: ‘You know, I’…”— John Macdonald, amazon.com
“I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they’re really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted,…”— Terry Goodkind, goodreads.com
“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com
“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”— Julio Cortazar, amazon.com
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”— Beatrix Potter, amazon.com
“Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t…If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”— Nikki Giovanni, tor.com
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”— Marcel Proust, amazon.com
“There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.”— Sharon Olds, amazon.com
“Writing is the flip side of sex - it’s good only when it’s over.”— Hunter S. Thompson, goodreads.com
“Why do I write. Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness.”— Elie Wiesel, amazon.com
“Even if it isn’t the piece of work that finds an audience, it will teach you things you could have learned no other way.”— J. K. Rowling, marieclaire.co.uk
“I’ve always had trouble with the notion of ‘respectable’ work. I understand the human need to categorize, but I love the reality that he’s in his own stratosphere.”— Caroline Kepnes, ew.com