"The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying."
---Ken Follett
"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts."
---Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"...the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story."
---Anthony de Mello
"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
---Kathleen Norris
"Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free."
---Henry David Thoreau
"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only if you persist."
---Isaac Asimov
"If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs." ---unknown
"You will never know happiness until you have known sadness; the only way to experience success, is to have experienced failure."
---unknown
"The pen is mightier than the sword."
---Benjamin Franklin
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find
information upon it.”
---Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), statement made April 18, 1775
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
---Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The best style is the style you don't notice."
---Somerset Maugham
"As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out."
---Mark Twain
"A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident."
---W. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
---Winston Churchill
“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”
---Unknown
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author and I speak like a child."
---Vladimir Nobokov
“It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It
is the one that is most adaptable to change."
---Charles Darwin
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
---Anton Chekhov
"The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea."
---Thomas Mann
"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and
nobody wants to read."
--- Mark Twain
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
---Oliver Wendall Holmes
"Your manuscript is both good and original; the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
---Samuel Johnson, words to a fellow writer