“If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis

“I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.” – Truman Capote

“I write … because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” – George Orwell

“If I was not going to be published for the rest of my life, I would still go on writing. It's what I do.” - John le Carre

“When writing, I always draw from my own life and from that of those around me. I exorcise my demons, I vent my anger, what hurts me or bothers me, so I can heal and live.” – Manuel Vargas

“I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” – Stephen King

“Getting even is one reason for writing.” – William Gass

”[My satire] is a reaction against injustice, which I detest.” – Tom Sharpe

“As a writer, what I do is fundamentally interesting and fundamentally varied.”– David Nobbs

“My goal each time out is to write my best book ever. It's that simple.”– John Grisham

“All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life, is to try to understand it… that is the raison d'etre of the art of the novel.” – Milan Kundera

“In its essence, the purpose of satire is aggression. Satire has a great big blaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the centre.” – Wyndham Lewis

“I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrons. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.” – Harlan Ellison

“An artist taps into what's happening and articulates it back to society [before society knows it's happening].” – Bob Geldof

“Ridicule is the only way to treat those kinds of crooks that somehow end up in public office. Ridicule and scorn is all they deserve.” – Carl Hiaasen

“Novels are the closest thing we have to magic. They really help us to understand the world.” – Paul Morgan

“I think the funny thing about satire is that it's very difficult to get beyond the real thing, and if you wait twenty years you'll be behind the real thing as the world gets more and more absurd.” – David Nobbs

“The more you read, the more you know. The more your imagination works, the more you read. And that's – those are the tools of a good writer. You have to live. Nobody wants to hear – the world does not want to hear – a great novel from a 21 year-old. You've got to get a real job and get a real career, and you've got to go to work. And you've got to live and you've got to succeed and fail, and suffer, a little bit, or see suffering, heartache and heartbreak and all that before you really have anything to write.” – John Grisham

“Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer.”– Stephen King

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place.” – Pablo Picasso

“I am just the chronicler. My passion is to discover and to write about it.”– Tom Wolfe

“It is a love affair between the author and the reader.”– Wilbur Smith

“Telepathy, of course.” – Stephen King

“All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation - it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.” – William Strunk Jr & E.B. White, Elements of Style

“When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds…we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.”– Stephen King

“One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dust-bin haphazard and emptying it in another place.” – Evelyn Waugh

“The most difficult thing is starting. And this is the secret. You don't do anything first [after you wake up]. You don't even get dressed. You go straight there and you start to write for half an hour, and then you get dressed.” – Jackie Collins

“The best time to write is first thing in the morning, and you simply plow in and go as long as you can, and then take a coffee break, and resume. When the spring of inspiration dries up, usually sometime in the early afternoon, one simply shifts over to editing, which is an unending job and one with its own pleasures, and when that begins to fade, it's time to close up shop. But now that I'm taking a break from alcohol, evenings are now available, so sometimes the shop reopens. As one heads toward the far turn of one's career, everything seems more urgent and you try to keep pushing. Books wait to be written, shows stretch out from here to 2010, and then there is the sonnet collection to finish. The play. And so forth. The real secret to keeping up your enthusiasm is to write in as many genres and forms as possible. Variety is better than vacation.” – Garrison Keillor

“I write six months a year. I find my story, find its voice, its people, its pace, and I retreat into my attic for six hours a day and shut out everything but family. As I write, I don't think about the readers, the sales, the movies. I think about the story. If I get it right, everything else falls into place.”– John Grisham

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”– Stephen King

“I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it – it will haunt you till it's written.” – Truman Capote

“Be brave. Map the enemy's positions, come back, tell us all you know.”– Stephen King

“I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.” – Truman Capote

Nobbs: “I don't think I was bothered about story when I was younger. Perhaps you don't respect the reader as much when you're young.”

Interviewer: “What were you more bothered about as a writer then? Getting the jokes in?”

Nobbs: “Getting the jokes in and showing people how clever I was and therefore occasionally failing to be clever most dismally.”

“Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?” - Truman Capote

“The idea of using suspense or a suspense novel as a framework for satire is just useful to me and it's natural to me from doing newspaper work. From writing about crime it's perfectly natural because that's what much of what we do is. Especially in South Florida whether it's violent crime or good old fashioned corruption, a lot of what we write about is right or wrongdoing.” – Carl Hiaasen

“The object of fiction is ….to make the reader welcome and then tell a story…to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”– Stephen King

”[Richard] Condon was a cynic of the upbeat type…his belief that everything is basically shit did not get in the way of his pleasure in making fun of it.” (Review of Condon's The Manchurian Candidate).

“The things that we pick a book up for ? to go on a sort of journey through different places, different scenarios, different emotions. . . it moves the story along, as well, which is what people love, obviously. I mean, they don't like stories in which nothing happens because they're not stories.” – Harriet Smart

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” – Emily Dickinson

“Unless we laugh at nothing, we laugh at truth to life: life in all its complexity, where people, even created people, are not just characters, but individuals.” – Clive James

“You keep coming back to journalism, which is continually hard work, to describe action, to narrate a sequence of events and somehow keep your own fine sensibility out of it, to simply say how the game progressed.” – Garrison Keillor

“Humans are creatures with brains built for processing stories rather than facts.” – Stefan Klein

“Put a character up a tree and throw stones at them.” – J Michael Straczynski

“Book buyers want something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages. This happens, I think, when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviours, their surroundings, and their talk.”– Stephen King

”[Creating real people] is what we're striving for. I certainly am. I want people to worry about my characters long after they put the book down.” – Harriet Smart

“A novel must have conflict, not just in its overarching idea, but in every single scene.” – Caro Clarke

“If you don't write conflict, you have nothing.” – Neil Simon

“All plays, including farces, are better when the author feels he has something important to say.” – Lajos Egri

“If there's no joy in it, it's just no good.”– Stephen King

“I think all novels should be journalism to start, and if you can ascend from that plateau to some marvellous altitude, terrific.” – Tom Wolfe

”[Harry Potter] was the first time I really, really believed in something I'd written. Prior to this work, I'd never tried to get anything published because I just knew when I would reread it that it wasn't good enough. But this book I loved more than anything I'd ever done before.” – J.K. Rowling

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”– Elmore Leonard (www.elmoreleonard.com/)

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.” – John Ruskin

“It's the little details, I think, that make all the difference in comedy writing.” – David Nobbs

“A character has to be very subtly drawn and tiny things can make all the difference, I think.” – Harriet Smart

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” – Mark Twain

“Here [in Orwell's collected journalism] was the proof that it took effort to write plain prose, but if you could do so, the results might have the effect of poetry. A simple-seeming sentence could have a cadence to remember.” – Clive James

“My style, if such it is, works by packing stuff in, not stretching it out and there is always a danger of trying to say too much at once.” – Clive James

“I will recognise the strangeness of genuine fact when I read it.” – James May

“One of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us instead. If I have to tell you, I lose.”– Stephen King

“The more technique there is, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.” – Pablo Picasso

“For a writer, the control is tone control. Without that, your force of expression will pull your prose to bits, leaving it wrecked by its own impetus.” – Clive James

“The sure sign of his [Kingsley Amis'] greatness as a comic writer is that nothing interested him less than mere wordplay. If he ever gave in to it, it was a sign that he was on the ropes, and that his peculiar gift for self-examination had been switched off, perhaps through fear of what it might reveal” – Clive James, on Kingsley Amis

“I've always been fascinated with words - as well as their meaning, how they sound. I'm never happy with a sentence until I've read it out and it sounds right.” – Paul Morgan

When Ernest Hemingway started as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star, he was given a style sheet with four basic rules:

* Use short sentences. * Use short first paragraphs. * Use vigorous English. * Be positive, never negative

“Those were the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing. I've never forgotten them. No one with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the things he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides by them.? – Ernest Hemingway

Elmore leonard's 10 Rules of Writing: http://www.google.com/search?q=Elmore+Leonard's+10+rules+of+writing

“I often had the feeling [that the hero of the novel Tom] Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing.” – Patrica Highsmith

”[When you're writing is flowing] you are an amanuensis.” – Tom Sharpe

“You, however, should not write anything you do not believe. The premise should be a conviction of your own, so that you may prove it wholeheartedly. Perhaps it is a preposterous premise to me – it must not be so to you.” – Lajos Egri

“If you begin to lie about what you know and feel while you're down there, everything falls down.”– Stephen King

“I've seen so much stuff that's been ruined by writers' getting carried away with getting a good joke in. We threw jokes on the floor if they made someone look too clever or undermined the story.” – Ricky Gervais

“First novel traps [are] such as too much unprocessed autobiography, too crude and obvious an agenda, too self-conscious or wavering a narrative voice, too intrusive a shtick or too unplanned a plot.”– Kerryn Goldsworthy

“The artist and the polemicist need to be separated if both are to thrive.” – Knut Hamsun

“If there is no clear-cut, active premise, it is more than possible that the characters were not alive. How could they be? They do not know, for instance, why they should commit a perfect crime. Their only reason is your command, and as a result all their performance and all their dialogue are artificial. No one believes what they do or say.” – Lajos Egri

“Be terribly aware of your audience. Don't write for yourself - that's selfish.” – 'Mister Midnight'

“Sequels are chewing your cud twice. When [Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle [got] fed up with Holmes, he threw him off a cliff. You say what you've got to say, then you get off stage, and go write something else.” – Harlan Ellison

“A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.” – Don Marquis

“Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at [describing] the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.” – Elmore Leonard

When the draft is finished, I put the manuscript away for a while, a week, a month, sometimes longer. When I take it out again, I read it as coldly as possible, then read it aloud to a friend or two, and decide what changes I want to make to it and whether or not I want to publish it. If all goes well, I type the final version on white paper and that's that. - Truman Capote

“When I write a book, I speak it aloud. I think: 'How would this go over if I were reading it out to an audience?'”– Clive James

“Omit; that is the essence of art.” – Oscar Wilde

“After we wrote each [Yes Minister] episode, we would show it to some secret sources, always including somebody who was an expert on the subject in question. They would usually give us extra information which, because it was true, was usually funnier than anything we might have thought up.” – Jonathan Lynn

“Whenever you feel the impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” - Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing

“Push yourself in the direction of your fears, and learn to master things that frighten you.” – Garrison Keillor

“I had that [fear] maybe 15, 20 years ago. I'd get that moment, the reflective moment. It would come and pass real quickly but now I know it's going to be there, so I don't pay any attention to it. It's just a little bird talking. You just say: get out.” – Clint Eastwood

“Fear and doubt are huge obstacles. In terms of your own work you have to try to overcome them. It would have been so easy to get freaked out but I'm really delighted that I didn't. I did lose the plot at times in some ways, as you do when you're immersed in something and you're kind of craving it stopping, but you can't let go of it either. And this is a document of what happened.” – David Gray

“I have seen some highly talented people put out of action by a failure. They take it as a just estimation of their abilities. I never questioned that I had a right to be there. Somewhere along the line, you have to say: 'I'm worth it'.”– Clive James

“Writer's block is a dirty five-letter word and it doesn't apply to me at all.” – Wilbur Smith

“There is a collective unconscious working in me that is absolutely true; I trust it absolutely; I give myself up to it; I will go anywhere it takes me.”– Harlan Ellison

“It's [the creative process] sometimes quite a dark place, and you don't know your way around. You have to go through all that grief to create something. And you think 'Well, there's no point going in here unless you're going to try and make sense of it'.” – Bryan Ferry

“The single biggest problem facing the first-time novelist is the challenge of maintaining confidence, consistency and coherence in the narrative voice.” – Kerryn Goldsworthy

“The one important thing I have learnt over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is imperative and the second disastrous.” – Ray Bradbury

“I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard. I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn - so much the better. Art is difficult.” – Vladimir Nabokov

“Make the fiction as good as possible, and everything else will fall into place.”– John Grisham

“The rules of the fenced-in world are few and easily understood; the messy outside world doesn't intrude to undo the magic. I could have tried to write like that. But I would not have got very far. I would have had to simplify too much, leave out a lot. It would have been to deny what I saw as my task as a writer.” – V. S. Naipaul

“You have to feel confident. If you don't, then you're going to be hesitant and defensive, and there'll be a lot of things working against you.” – Clint Eastwood

“I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.” – George Orwell

”[Martina Navratilova's] great central maxim that applies to all creative activities, is: What matters is not how well you're playing when you're playing well, but how well you're playing when you're playing badly.”– Clive James

“Talent renders the whole notion of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it until your fingers bleed. Even when no-one is reading, every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy.”– Stephen King

“You can write comedy when you're sick, when you're lonely as a barn owl and your head hurts and your friends are mad at you. It's just work, that's all, and you go do it if you need to.” – Garrison Keillor

“Since the necessary determination to press on in spite of failure - a determination that every artist must have - is indistinguishable from the futile determination to persist in a hopeless cause, the possibilities for self-delusion are infinite.”– Clive James

“The creative process never gets easier but the inspiration hasn't stopped.” – Wilbur Smith

“I have learned not to read reviews. Period. And I hate reviewers. All of them, or at least all but two or three. Life is much simpler ignoring reviews and the nasty people who write them. Critics should find meaningful work.” – John Grisham

“Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.” – Don Marquis

“You never perceive yourself the way you are perceived by the world. You always think you are unfairly criticised or unjustly lauded. It is hard to keep a perspective on yourself and it is better not to try because you always fall into a trap where you delude yourself.” – Woody Allen

“It's like being a musician. If you play every day, your embouchure is strong. If you play once every two years, you have to build up all over again.” – Clint Eastwood

“Fear is at the root of most bad writing. Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.”– Stephen King

“Talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really believing in your beliefs, whether they are true or false.” – George Orwell

“Writing is seduction.”– Stephen King

“The fact that you want to tell a story, you need to manufacture worlds of your own. You need characters to be living and breathing in your head.” – Wilbur Smith

“The expectation of the reader on the one hand and the writer on the other, and there's this sort of air in the middle where you put your side of a thing, and a reader picks it up and builds up the details, and if you've made the right hints?maybe it's like leading questions in court. You know, you present the right information, you don't have to present everything, and the reader will fill in the rest, and that's what I mean by a sleight of hand.” – Harriet Smart

“The wonderful illusion that good writing induces is the belief that, were you around with them then, you would have been one of them and definitely best friends.” – Richard E. Grant

“Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!” – Thomas Mann

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.” – George Orwell

“The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.” – Martin Cruz Smith

“Writers, whether they want to admit it or not, are in the business of calling attention to themselves. My own taste is counter-bohemian.”– Tom Wolfe

“I'm more shocked [about my success] than anybody because when I started I thought: Nobody outside of South Florida is going to get this. Or care about it. And the stakes are so low when you start – you've got nothing to lose – so you just cut loose and have fun.” – Carl Hiaasen

“I believe that all satire is moral, and that ultimately all good satire is based on the Gospel.” – Garrison Keillor

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.” – Don Marquis

“My greatest work happiness is a good day's writing. If I've done a good day's writing, I don't get depressed if the cheque doesn't come. If I've done a bad day's writing, I worry about money and all the problems of the world.” – David Nobbs

“Sometimes I marvel that I should be paid for having so much fun!” – Wilbur Smith

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” – George Orwell

“You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attach? or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.” – Thomas Mann

“You have to be an outsider to write.”– Martin Cruz Smith

“Nothing had prepared me for the liberation and absorption of this extended literary labour, the joy of allowing fantasy to play on stored experience, the joy of the comedy that so naturally offered itself, the joy of language.” – V. S. Naipaul