“My #1 advice always: Remove all judgment from your first draft. Don’t ask yourself if it’s good, if it’s bad, if it started in the wrong place, if you’re writing fast enough, if the hero’s eye color or name is perfect. Just look at a first draft as an inherently flawed part of the process. Once you’ve got the words on the paper, you can always revise and polish later, but you can’t fix a blank page. For me, the magic often comes in the third draft or even later. Judgment is the thief of progress.”

—Delilah S. Dawson/Lila Bowen

--

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”

-Anne Frank

--

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

-Stephen King

--

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

-Thomas Mann

--

“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 sheet of paper wins.”

-Neil Gaiman

--

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.”

-Joss Whedon

--

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

-Anne Proulx

--

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one after another after another until it's done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

-Neil Gaiman

--

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

-Jack London

--

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

-Anaïs Nin

--

“You have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry…”

-Brandon Sanderson

--

“Write the kind of story you would want 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

--

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”

-Anaïs Nin

--

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”

-Joss Whedon

--

“Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.”

-Stephen King

--

“I hate writing, I love having written.”

-Dorothy Parker

--

“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn this world upside down.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

--

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

-Margaret Atwood

--

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”

-Criss Jami

--

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

-Mark Twain

--

“A blank sheet of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”

-Sidney Sheldon

can i just say that mark twain was the greatest man to ever have lived??