“I begin with a personal cultural and human cataclysm. Something I am obsessed with.”— David Shields, thenervousbreakdown.com
“Poetry is as intimate as it is non-remunerative, a tiny part of the small word of books where writers lay themselves bare and mine the darkest corners of their lives for art.”— Kat Rosenfield, vulture.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
“I’m not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don’t think you get a true picture of people without it in writing… It’s a kind of poetry, it’s an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don’t think anything is true that doesn’t have it, that doesn’t have poet…”— Nelson Algren, amazon.com
“I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, amazon.com
“I've said all I want to say in both fiction and nonfiction, at least at this point. But that doesn't mean in five years or so I won't recharge my batteries and start writing again.”— Arthur C. Clarke, futurism.media
“If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn’t that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.”— Therese Anne Fowler, amazon.com
“When writing a book, I think of the people who will read it twice or more, not the people who will read it once.”— Tao Lin, twitter.com
“I wanted to write where I’m just drifting around, the way I do in Delhi, in mosques and strange places, as I have all my life. Just delighting in all the crazies and the sweethearts, and the joy in the saddest places, and the unexpectedness of things.”— Arundhati Roy, theguardian.com
“You have to take the plunge. It’s easy to talk about the process, but it’s a confrontation. You’re confronting a blank page. It’s like drawing. You stare at a blank canvas and it goes from itself. You can call it a process, but you’re studying where this inspiration comes from. I don’t even have a s…”— Sam Shepard, sam-shepard.com
“I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things. I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it. That’s all there is to it. If you a…”— Marianne Moore, theparisreview.org
“As if writing were, like love, the offspring of a cloud. When you touch it, it melts.”— Mahmoud Darwish, amazon.com
“Writers are all so obsessed with mystery. They can’t afford to solve the mystery, because the next day they’d become irrelevant.”— Tony Grisoni, Paolo Sorrentino, Lenny Belardo, Jude Law, imdb.com
“The hands went along with the body wherever it went. They wept when the body wept, trembled each time the body fell silent with pleasure. Salt and regret left their mark on them. Babies and wineglasses were entrusted to them, since the hands were precise, and enigmatic. Were they light beacons, real…”— Kathryn Hunt, narrativemagazine.com