“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
“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
“Up and coming writers, I warmly urge you to not read Goodreads reviews of your book. The site is for readers, not writers. Spare yourself.”— Roxane Gay, twitter.com
“When in doubt, write. To celebrate, write. As a balm, write. When you mess up, write. To escape, write. When the world burns, write.”— Quiara Alegría Hudes, twitter.com
“It is good that for the moment you are going into a profession which will make you independent and mean you only have yourself to rely on, in every sense. Have the patience to wait and see whether your inmost life feels confined by the form of this occupation. I consider it a very difficult and a ve…”— Rainer Maria Rilke, 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
“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
“What this means for the true novelist is that he or she must continue to soldier on, keep writing, keep trying, taking the increasingly painful hits of rejection after rejection until, well, until someone out there catches on…or doesn’t.”— Warren Adler, warrenadler.com
“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”— Gustave Flaubert, books.google.com.ph
“It’s important to learn how to balance the writer’s mind (free-flowing, wild, possibly insane) and the editor’s mind (careful, craftsmanlike, obsessive about detail), and in fact you need both.”— Cary Groner, glimmertrain.com