Quotes from famous writers (on the process of creating)
1. "You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it." - Octavia E. Butler
2. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." - William Faulkner
3. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison
4. "I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." - Shannon Hale
5. "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
6. "It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly." - C. J. Cherryh
7. "Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head." - Mike Rich
8. "If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write." - Somerset Maugham
9. "If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it." - Wally Lamb
11. "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." - Annie Proulx
12. "As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."
- Ernest Hemingway
13. ''One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.'' - Lawrence Block
14. ''Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.'' - Ray Bradbury
15. ''This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.'' - Neil Gaiman
16. ''Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.'' - William Faulkner
17. ''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
18. ''There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.'' - W. Somerset Maugham
19. ''I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.'' - Tom Clancy
20. ''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
21. ''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
22. ''No person who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.'' - CS Lewis
