"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

--Toni Morrison

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
--Mark Twain

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

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."
--Kurt Vonnegut

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page."
--Eudora Welty

"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different."
--Neil Gaiman

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

--Elmore Leonard