"Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you - as if you haven't been told a million times already - that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching."
Harlan Ellison
"In nearly all good fiction, the basic - all but inescapable - plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw."
John Gardner
"The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale."
James Gunn
"In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts."
Shirley Ann Grau
"Writers are always selling somebody out."
Joan Didion
"What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world."
E. L. Doctorow
"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."
J. P. Donleavy
"As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
"An excellent precept for writers: have a clear idea of all the phrases and expressions you need, and you will find them."
Ximenes Doudan
"Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up."
Jane Yolen
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