“Scare the world. Be exactly who you say you are and tell the truth.”— Iain Cain Thomas, goodreads.com
“All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.”— Gaston Bachelard, amazon.com
“The pleasures of writing include acting like exaggerations of your most-extreme self.”— Chuck Palahniuk, reddit.com
“I still believe that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”— Nick Denton, observer.com
“Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”— Steven Pinker, amazon.com
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”— Jonathan Gottschall, amazon.com
“The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all ot…”— Marshall McLuhan, amazon.com
“Writing for the press cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to anyone qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to se…”— John Stuart Mill, gutenberg.org
“I no longer want to read bad writing. Information is not the same as writing. Just because you can type, that does not make the result readable. Then again, writing, good writing, is rarely profitable, so the whole Internet is laden with link-bait, which I occasionally click on, illustrating that th…”— Bob Lefsetz, lefsetz.com
“A great storyteller is keenly attuned to his audience; he knows when to slow down for maximum suspense and when to speed up for comic effect.”— Gary Vaynerchuk, amazon.com
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit… He that writes with blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route yo…”— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com
“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things, or the Nothingness, behind it. Grammar and Style— to me they seem to have become as i…”— David Shields, amazon.com
“The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word.”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“In writing, the most enthralling moment is that of condensation, ellipsis, rarefaction. Building up increasingly dense nuclei around which light is disoriented, and thought too, since it lost the sense of its origin.”— Jean Baudrillard, amazon.com
“I’m finding it harder to just ‘write.’ The seeking and sculpting of found text or sound have become my primary ‘artistic’ function. Actually generating that text or music seems increasingly difficult. Lately I’ll sit down with a blank pad and feel like I really have to dig down deep to get my own vo…”— David Shields, amazon.com