"To write it, it took three months. To conceive it, three minutes. To collect the data in it, all my life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Having a point to start is important. You know that when you decide to write something it's like a commitment. It's like falling in love."
— Isabel Allende
"For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life."
— Haruki Murakami
"I see your life as something artful, waiting — just waiting and ready for you to make it art."
— Toni Morrison
"I learned never to empty the well of my writing. But always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."
— Ernest Hemingway
"Make the familiar exotic, the exotic familiar."
— Bharati Mukherjee
"Music infuses your spirit with a certain energy that I try to convey in my work."
— Oscar Hijuelos
"Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it."
— Emily Dickinson
"I think I'm a better writer now, because I don't waste as much time — dilly-dallying and sassafrasin' and sloop and sloppin' and frying eggs."
— James McBride
"I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music."
— Maya Angelou
"Don't bend. Don't water it down. Don't try to make it logical. Don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
— Franz Kafka
"What is right to be done cannot be done too soon."
— Jane Austen
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good."
— William Faulkner
"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende