I have quite a few.
"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." - Meg Cabot (I follow this rule as I write.)
"I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it." - Ray Bradbury (How I write my first drafts.)
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath (An anti-thesis to 'write what you know', which I don't agree with.)
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." - Mark Twain (Although I don't see a problem in the word very, I just like the humor in this.)
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King
"It is often been said
there's so much to be read
you can never cram
all those words in your head.
So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.
That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.
And that's why your books
have such power and strength
You publish with shorth!
(Shorth is better than length.)" - Dr. Seuss (Because I believe in the simplicity of words.)
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. The truest sentence that you know." - Ernest Hemingway
"Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want." - Stephen King
"Not writing is a great deal worse than writing." - Flannery O'Connor
"Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov (Love this quote for showing, not telling.)
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury (I think someone already mentioned this, but it was worth mentioning again.)
"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth." -Kurt Vonnegut
"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say." - Anais Nin
"Don't write about Man; write about a man." - E.B. White
"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For these two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people." - Roald Dahl
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible." - Vladimir Nabokov
"I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words." - Craig Claiborne
"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones to form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment." - Hart Crane
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write." - Saul Bellow (ha, ha, I do this a lot.)
"Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them." - Haruki Murakami
"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write precisely what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish." - Robert Louis Stevenson
"I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live." - Anais Nin
"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." - Beatrix Potter
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins." - Neil Gaiman
"This is how you do it: you sit down at your keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard." - Neil Gaiman
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions." - James A. Michener
"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly and tell it as best as you can. I'm not sure there are any other rules. Not ones that matter." - Neil Gaiman
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory." - Tennessee Williams
"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version." - Chuck Palahniuk
"There are three rules to writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." - W. Saumerset Maugham
Ha, ha. That's quite a lot of quotes. Sorry for all that. I keep a quote blog, so I do daily quote hunting and the quotes I really like I save.
