We say we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves.

~ Alice Bloch

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.
William Campbell Gault

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Stephen King

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Stephen King

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
Ray Bradbury

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury

Get you facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.
Mark Twain

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
Mark Twain

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
Isaac Asimov

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded!
Sidney Sheldon

Hmmm...I thnk you've posted a whole month's worth of quotes there.

Good job.

Thanks!

If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.
by Bern Williams.

Walking is a series of controlled falls. Each step forward shifts our center of gravity. In harmony with this fall, our bodies extend a leg to catch the center and balance it momentarily before it is cast forward again. We can do this with our writing - throw ourselves off ballance in order to catch our balance again as we move forward." 

Richard R. Powell
Wabi Sabi for Writers

"Sometimes the rewriting is kind of like twitching -- it's a twitching that keeps you active while you're trying to figure out what to [write] next. You're rewriting the scene that you're rewriting, but that's causing your writing muscles to actually start writing the scene you're going to do next."
– Mr. Brooks' Bruce A. Evans

"Be willing to write very badly, because the good comes after the bad, but you've got to release that bad stuff, sometimes, to get at the good." 

- Jennifer Egan in an interview in The Writer, May 2007

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
- Samuel Johnson

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."

• Gilda Radner

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. - Karl Kraus

"When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light."
John W. Gardner

"There is a myth at large in the general population, easily quashable
yet somehow allowed to persist, that writing comes smoothly, like gas
from a pump, or at least unbidden, like tears. This is bull. No decent
prose is ever dashed off, especially that which appears to be
effortlessly dashing. Just as Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks had
to rehearse their leaps and pratfalls, so grace on the page has to be
earned with infinite sweat." --Anthony Lane

"It makes no difference whether you are old or young, tall or short, skinny or plump.. . . Reveal your special talent to the world."

From the jacket-flap of Mikhail Baryshnikov's children's book Because...

"You can't try to do things; you simply must do them." --Ray Bradbury

(Yeah, I know that sounds like Yoda.)

"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not
lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through
the jungles of self, the world, and of craft." --Jessamyn West

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult." ~ Stephen Leacock