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'Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.'

— Chang-Rae Lee

‘For me it always starts with the characters, and I hope that the characters take me to the plot - that's the plan, anyhow. I just start with a few ideas and hope it works out. I suppose if having written 28 books has taught me anything, it's that it might work out in the end.'

— Elly Griffith

'Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.'

— Stephen King

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

— Isaac Asimov

'Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.'

— Barbara Kingsolver

‘Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.'

— Adrienne Posey

'I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.'

— Cormac McCarthy

‘There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call "the breaks". In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.'

— Countee Cullen

'Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.'

— Martin Amis

'If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.'

— Charles Darwin

'Being a writer in Hollywood is like going into Hitler's Eagle's Nest with a great idea for a Bar Mitzvah.'

— David Mamet

'You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.'

— Anne Rice

'Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.'

— Miguel de Cervantes

'For those who can do it and who keep their nerve, writing for a living still beats most real, grown-up jobs hands down.'

— Terence Blacker

'Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.'

— Rose Tremain

'One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.'

— Billy Collins

'By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.'

— Roald Dahl

‘I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.'

— Shirley Jackson

'The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof lie detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.'

— Ernest Hemingway

'Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.'

— Rose Tremain

'What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.'

— Erica Jong

'There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."'

— Margaret Atwood

'A writer who isn't writing isn't really alive.'

— Robin McKinley

'What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.'

— Erica Jong

'People say, "What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?" I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.'

— R L Stine

'All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.'

— Nina Bawden

'I know I am finished with a book when I never want to see it again. And if you have worked at it long enough to hate the sight of it, I promise you will come to love it again some sweet day. That is when you will know you did a writer's work.'

— Robert Benson

'The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

— Adrienne Posey

'Nothing annoys a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked what he's writing.'

— Javier Cercas

'Write what you know. Learn what you don't.'

— Lidia Longorio

'There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."'

— Margaret Atwood

'The most crucial thing is to learn the craft: how to string sentences together, how to make your dialogue sound like real people, how to properly pace a story, how to develop interesting characters.'

— Stephen Coonts

'Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.'

— Brian Aldiss

'The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence - arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.'

— Hilary Mantel

'I don't choose my characters, rather, they come to me. Books choose their authors, at least that's what I believe.'

— Suzy Davies

'The one thing you learn is that nobody knows what will sell.'

— Jack Higgins

'Writing after many years becomes a place you can hide. Because you acquire a certain amount of craft, it allows you to do something while not revealing yourself.'

— Anne Carson

'An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.'

— Irwin Shaw

'Always thought being a writer would be one of the most useless things you could be in a zombie apocalypse, but it turns out arts and culture and storytelling is what helps us get through. Along with science, doctors, nurses, delivery people, farm workers and supermarket cashiers.'

— Lauren Beukes

‘Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.'

— William Golding
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