From Aldous Huxley: “I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to
work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. ‘The first thing,’ I said, ‘is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'”

From Steve Martin: “I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.”

From Isaac Asimov: (from “Asimov Laughs Again”):
“I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days. In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her.

She said, “Don’t you ever want to do anything but write?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?”

And I said, “No! No! No! and No!”

She said, “But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?”

I said, “Type faster.”

From Charles Dickens, in the voice of Mr. Brownlow in “Oliver Twist”: “Don’t be afraid! We won’t make an author of you, while there’s an honest trade to be learnt, or brickmaking to turn to.”

From Madeleine L’Engle: “I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.”

From Flannery O’Connor: “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

From Sylvia Plath: “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Plath again:”Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”

From Plato: “Don’t ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.”

From Red Smith: “Writing is easy. You just sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”