“The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it — to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain — to the end of the story — and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.”
— Frank Conroy
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
— Jack London
"Writing is my search engine, it is the medium through which I try to make sense out of life."
— Mark Salzman
“I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.”
— Jack London
"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."
— Isaac Asimov
"Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."
— C.S. Lewis
"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it."
— Benjamin Disraeli
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."
— Robert Louis Stevenson
"Remember, your story is an uneasy bargain with your reader. Your end of the bargain is to play fair, and keep him interested, his end of the bargain is to keep reading. It is just terribly terribly easy to put a story down half-read and go off and do something else."
— Shirley Jackson
"I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read."
— Tracy Kidder