“Your writing experience is not the same as anyone else's. What another writer does to tell their story will not be your way. Do what is best to write your story and do it to the best of your ability. That means be true to your story & responsible to your readers.”— Ellen Oh, twitter.com
“The first yes, though, is the one you tell yourself. That one’s huge. It’s when you say, I will do this anyway. I will do it because it matters to me to make this attempt at the summit. You will not be perfect. No one is perfect. It will be hard. Everything is hard.”— Maria Dahvana Headley, twitter.com
“You can do it. You can be completely daunted and scared, and still, if you do the work to learn how to write, and do the work of writing, you can make stories people will read. You can change myths people think they’ve committed to memory. You can rock this place.”— Maria Dahvana Headley, twitter.com
“No one else’s standards of most apply. Do the things YOU imagine. Don’t try to make yourself into someone else’s version of a How To Be A Writer. Be the writer you are, & reach for the most amazing work you can do.”— Maria Dahvana Headley, twitter.com
“For me, seriously, my goal is to topple the structures of toxic hierarchy. On as many levels as I can. All at once. I want damn equality and that is why I write these books. Stories make the world.”— Maria Dahvana Headley, twitter.com
“Don’t worry about pleasing others. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. Be the writer you wanted to read but never found. Develop a strong core that you can return to again and again, something that isn’t predicated on external validation.”— Jenny Zhang, twitter.com
“There is no right way to write. The only thing that works is whatever works for you.”— V.E. Schwab, twitter.com
“Read as a writer! Read to understand HOW an author created conflict, heightened your emotional response, created a turn in the text. Read like a surgeon. Read like a locksmith. Read like an ethical, non-plagiarizing but absorptive thief.”— Elizabeth Acevedo, twitter.com
“I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far . . . I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”— Haruki Murakami, amazon.com
“Cultural appropriation is the act of adopting certain aspects of a culture in a manner that disrespects the cultural significance and inaccurately represents a community.”— Ixty Quintanilla, everydayfeminism.com
“It didn't take long for me to realize that writing, performing and singing songs was what I was meant to do, but what other people thought was an entirely different issue. If I had to break it down, I’d say about 99 percent of the people in my life were telling me I wasn’t going to make it. All that…”— Willie Nelson, en.wikiquote.org
“Being a writer is like being a sculptor, except a writer makes her own stone.”— Ana Menendez, tinhouse.com
“The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day.”— Patricia Lockwood, tinhouse.com
“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”— Ellen Degeneres, books.google.com
“I have wasted my life is a cry of triumph—I’m lying here in this hammock doing nothing and haha on you out there working your lives away.”— Patricia Hampl, theparisreview.org
“Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.””— Patricia Hampl, theparisreview.org
“At the very beginning when we started nine seasons ago with the first couple of shows I was going to do, I loved the work, the writing, the guys, but I knew we had to keep pushing the envelope. After a few years, they really started taking me seriously too… I don’t ever say, ‘No, that’s too much.’ T…”— Danny DeVito, cinemablend.com
“The fear of not being successful outweighed any fears I had about my writing ability.”— Ryan O’Connell, itunes.apple.com
“Just as your heart has been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach.”— Patricia Lockwood, tinhouse.com
“I’m an author myself, and that truth pains me even now. I wrote one of those “not good enough” books. In fact, I wrote three.”— Lauren Spieller, theguardian.com