Here are some quotes I like:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. – Stephen King

I think that you've got to be prepared to write a load of nonsense to start with and then you can tart it up. The business of getting going, getting started, is enormously important, and this can be physical. Solvitur Ambulando as the Romans used to say, which means the solution comes through walking. -- Colin Dexter

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up. – Margaret Atwood

The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff. – Marvin BellGood writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. -- E.L. Doctorow

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them. – Diane Arbus

Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the version of reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear quickly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment. – John Edgar Wideman

One doesn’t write stories about people who are comfortable in their skins. You have to have trouble to write a story. If you don’t have trouble, you don’t have a story. – Tobias Wolff

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad. -- Doris Lessing

Literature was not born the day a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: Literature was born on the day a boy came crying “wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf behind him. -- Vladimir Nabokov

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

One writes in order to feel: that is the fundamental mover. – Rita Dove

Once when my phone was out of order I went our very late at night to make a call from a public phone at a supermarket plaza. At something like two in the morning all the stores were closed but the plaza was not empty. There were three women there, one of them with a baby in a stroller. What were they doing there? It was several years before I figured out a possible answer, and that answer was a story. – Janet Burroway

Back when I was an English major I could read fiction and be thinking up a term paper at the same time. But I don’t read for credit anymore. I read to amuse myself, for the companionship, and with the hope that I’ll hear something true about somebody’s life. – Garrison Keillor

Let the readers do some of the work themselves. -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.” – Saul Bellow

I began to write because I was too shy to talk, and too lonely not to send messages. – Heather McHugh

No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao tse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes. – Henry Miller

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads. – Erica Jong