"I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me."

• Anna Quindlen

Sent to me by the Nastional Association of Women Writers: Woman's Quote of the Day

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." ~ C.S. Lewis

"If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.” --Maxwell Perkins

"Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." - Colette, from Casual Chance

 The more you read,
         the more you know.

         The more you know,
         the futher you'll go.

               -Dr. Seuss

"Notes are like Velcro. As you try to skim them, they ensnare you, and pretty soon you can't see the story for the details. 'Repeat over and over, 'The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head.'" --Jane Harrigan

"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it."
--- Harlan Ellison

"Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you...I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force." --Gustave Flaubert

"When I'm working on a novel, I keep a
regular schedule, just as if it were a job.
I get up early in the morning and do my
writing for the day as soon as I've worked
out. I write five pages a day, five days a week,
when I'm working on a rough draft of a novel,
regardless of where I am."

-Bestselling Author Elizabeth George
in a June, 2007, interview in The Writer

"Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences." --Anne McCaffrey

"Don't wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself."
                                 -- Sara Henderson

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

• Virginia Woolf

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need
not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put
the foundations under them."
-- Henry David Thoreau

"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it." --Harlan Ellison

"We don't know who we are until we see what we can do."
                                     -- Martha Grimes

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
G. K. Chesterton