"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."

-Barbara Kingsolver

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."

-Orson Scott Card

"My students often told me they didn't have anything to say. They were silent. Empty. They felt anxiety. Panic. Terror. 'Good' I'd answer. 'You are a writer. You are at the place from which writing comes.'"

~Donald Murray in Shoptalk

"A page a day is a book a year. . ."

—Richard Rhodes, How to Write, p. 178

"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules."

—Anthony Trollope

"Sometimes I think writers are people who run out of good books to read and decide in desperation to write their own. (If that's your game, beware: writing makes you a more discriminating reader, which correspondingly reduces the number of books you can bear to read.)"

—by Richard Rhodes, How to Write, p. 87

As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted.

—L.M. Montgomery

A word after a word after a word is power.

—Margaret Atwood

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

—Mary Higgins Clark