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

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.

-Erica Jong

Half my life is an act of revision.

-John Irving

People on the outside think there?s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn?t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that?s all there is to it.

-Harlan Ellison

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

-Edgar Rice Burroughs

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

-E. L. Doctorow

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is its own reward.

-Henry Miller

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he?ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.

-Ray Bradbury