A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

~Mark Twain

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

~Pablo Picasso

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

~Stephen King

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

~Gustave Flaubert

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

~ Susan Sontag

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

~Henry Louis Mencken

The sound of two jaws flapping does not a page of dialogue make. All that unbroken he-said-she-said gets numbing, even confusing. Dialogue needs a narrative framework to vary the pace, let time pass and advance the story--to give three-dimensional context to speech.

~Arthur Plotnik

By making writing a part of your daily routine--just like brushing your teeth--you'll discipline yourself to work as a writer instead of a hobbyist who only writes when there's some fun to be had.

~Theresa Grant

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists--even of the fact he is reading a book.

~Ford Madox Ford

Writing requires a lot of discipline. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There are no lazybones in writing. No idiots, either. You have to be dedicated, motivated, and smart.

~Lori Foster

I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic, striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

~Brenda Ueland

Words--so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne

The problem is that horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. Horror is not a kind of fiction. It's a progressive form of fiction that continually evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times.

~Douglas E. Winter

Once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

~Virginia Woolf

The second most common question I get is "Where do you get your ideas?" Anywhere, everywhere and nowhere. In fact I don't "get" my ideas. If you have to go hunting for an idea, you're not a writer. They just come to you. Then they simmer in your head until they become soup.

~Rett MacPherson

There comes a moment in the day, when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes the hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.

~H.G. Wells

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

~Christopher Morley

I believe the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross; that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.

~Virginia Woolf