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“Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide To Writing Nonfiction

“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.”
― Javier Marias Franco

“When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.”
― Tony Hoagland (Editor), Ploughshares

“I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.”
― Edmund White, Forgetting Elena

“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102”
― Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection

“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”
― Marie Howe

“[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

“The greatest writers have persistence.”
― Gina Nahai

“Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of a critical public?”
― Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs

“I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.”
― Howard Nemerov

“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”
― Bill Barich

“The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.”
― Janet Frame, Janet Frame: An Autobiography

“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ”
― Charles Baxter

“(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.”
― Nick Flynn, The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

“No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”
― Isaac Babel

“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.

Alone. Alone to the very end. Iâ€� every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”
― Andre P. Brink, A Dry White Season

“It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,â€� [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”
― Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960

“No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.”
― Malcolm Cowley

“I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

(So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Only write if you can't not.”
― Stephen Bergman

“ A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.”
― Dee Dee M Scott

“This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.”
― Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction

“If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.”
― Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography

“I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators.”
― Johnny Rico

“When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.”
― Brandi Bates

“This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride â€� somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.”
― Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction

“As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.”
― Joseph O'Neill, Netherland