Everything is copy.

—Nora Ephron

Genius gives birth,
talent delivers.

–Jack Kerouac

If you love words, love to read,
and have read all of your life,
you’ve already had a
full-time course in writing.

—Richard Rhodes

If you want to write, if you want
to create, you must be the
most sublime fool that God
ever turned out and sent
rambling. You must write every
single day of your life. You
must read dreadful dumb
books and glorious books,
and let them wrestle in
beautiful fights inside your
head, vulgar one moment,
brilliant the next. You must lurk
in libraries and climb the stacks
like ladders to sniff books like
perfumes and wear books like
hats upon your crazy heads.
I wish you a wrestling match
with your Creative Muse that
will last a lifetime.

―Ray Bradbury

Becoming a writer is about
becoming conscious. When you’re
conscious and writing from a place
of insight and simplicity and real
caring about the truth, you have
the ability to throw the lights on
for your reader. He or she will
recognize his or her life and truth
in what you say, in the pictures you
have painted, and this decreases
the terrible sense of isolation that
we have all had too much of.

―Anne Lamott

On writing, my advice
is the same to all.
If you want to be a writer, write.
Write and write and write.
If you stop, start again.
Save everything that you write.
If you feel blocked,
write through it until you feel
your creative juices flowing again.
Write.
Writing is what makes a writer,
nothing more and nothing less.

—Anne Rice

Because I am still a living
author, still at work,
I think of what I am
writing, very little of what
I have written.

—Wendell Berry

Those are the days you love.
The days when somebody has to
wake you up and tell you where
you are. But there are a lot of
days when you’re just slogging
along. And you’re very conscious
of your stuff and the typewriter is
a machine and the paper is blank.
You’ve got to be willing to
put in those days in order to get
to the days when it’s flowing
like magic.

—Kathleen Paterson