“It is in the hard, hard, rock-pile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader’s interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.”

– John Mason Brown, Dramatis Personae: A Retrospective Show, Compass Book ed. (New York, Viking, 1965), p. 458.

“Writing is a way of arguing with ourselves, a way of keeping ourselves honest by discovering precisely what we believe and finding out whether we are justified in believing it.”

–Jim Raymond, Writing (Is an Unnatural Act), (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 2

“Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don’t practice it.”

–  Wallace Stegner

“Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.”

– John Updike, “The Importance of Fiction,” in his  Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1991), p.86

“If I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things which shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto….If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.”

– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1973), pp. 27-28.

“The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding.  We need the eyes of writers like that to see through.  We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”

–Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, ed George Connor (New York, Harper San Francisco, 1992), p. 191.