“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door opened. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.” -Stephen King from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (57)
“The quality that writers need to cultivate absolute most, above everything else, is patience. Not only for publishing, but for writing.” -Gail Carson Levine at the First Annual Oxford Writing Festival (see http://www.oxfordwritingfestival.weebly.com)
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” -E. B. White
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.” -Mark Twain
“You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.” -G.K. Chesterton
“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” -Arthur Polotnik
“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” -John Edgar Wideman
“In order to write about life, first you must live it!” Ernest Hemingway
Little Songs 