“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson

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“You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.”

– Jack London

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“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”

– Joseph Heller

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“And how is clarity to be achieved?  Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.”

– F. L. Lucas, Style (London: Cassell, 1955), p. 76.

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“I felt an urgency to write words that I could stand behind with conviction, words that I could trust to say out loud in public because I had thrashed them out in private until they were as true as I could get them, until they said exactly what I mean, exactly what I believed, even if those words might provoke some people to outrage.”

– John Stoltenberg, Refusing to be a Man (New York, Meridian, 1990), p. 3.

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“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart.  You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly.  Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”

– Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 106.

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“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

– Elmore Leonard, in Newsweek, 22 April 1985.

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“You learn to write by writing.  It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true.  The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.”

–  William Zinsser,  On Writing Well

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“For me and most of the writers I know, writing is not rapturous.  In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really, shitty first drafts.”

– Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Doubleday, Anchor ed., 1995), p. 22

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