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“A writer gets to live yet another life every time he or she creates a new story.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.

But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Tell a story in fewer and simpler words.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Don’t break the rules when you haven’t fully figured them out yet.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.”
― C. Kennedy

“Good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, and so on. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Or else they are likely going to move on to another book.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“A writer can do without food for a few hours but not without the sight of books.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“If you think there is no time to write now, there will never be.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a smaller number of words.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Clichés are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Your passion as an artist is a magnet that draws you at all times, but if you don’t follow, it will suffocate your heart.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“There is something so degrading - at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade - that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, "he does too much.”
― Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909â€�1965

“[T]he aesthetic act cannot be carried out without some element of astonishment, and that to be astonished by rote is difficult.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“For example, instead of saying that it was a rainy night, you can say, “At night she could see from her window that the postcard-perfect sky from an hour ago had turned to a dark abyss filled with tar-black clouds that had just begun to weep heavily, as though completely devoid of any hope in the humankind beneath.”
― Pawan Mishra, On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing

“Writing fiction is the act of extending empathy to or beyond its natural limits.”
― Donal Ryan

“From the moment we are born, we are swaddled in stories.”
― Karen Azinger, Power Writing: Make Your Genre Fiction Soar

“Stories pervade our lives. This inundation of content makes us all export story listeners, or expert story readers, but only a few of us dare to become expert story tellers. We dare to add our tales to the collective memory of mankind that stretches back to early cave paintings.”
― Karen Azinger, Power Writing: Make Your Genre Fiction Soar

“Themes are the very souls of stories.”
― Karen Azinger, Power Writing: Make Your Genre Fiction Soar

“On writing fiction. Let go - of everything. Certainly, that which you think you know. And do not seek meaning, but rather, truth, as you fall lost through the 'hot blind earth' of your unknown self.”
― Christian Fennell

“The business of making moving
pictures is the art of moving audiences.”
― Lawrence J. Kurnarsky, The Story of the Story: How to Kidnap Your Audience

“Manuals delineate the storytelling mechanics, which are important, but storytellers are more magicians than mechanics. Theirs is the art of controlled revelation of nothing less than the meaning of life, not all of it but some of it. These magi cast the spells that seduce the audience into suspending its disbelief in fictional characters and plots. They are aided by the audience’s eagerness to suspend disbelief.”
― Lawrence J. Kurnarsky, The Story of the Story: How to Kidnap Your Audience

“I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works [Deckle Edge] Reprint edition