E.L. Doctorow

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you are doing. None of that is writing. Writing is writing."

Ernest Hemingway

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed."

Natalie Goldberg

"We are important and our lives are important, magnficient really, and their details are worthy to be recorded."

Stephen King

"I write to find out what I think."

Annie Dillard

"The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

Faye Moskowitz

"For who will testify, who will accurately describe our lives if we do not do it ourselves?"

E.M. Forster

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

E.M. Foster

"There’s enough sorrow in the world, isn’t there, without trying to invent it."

John Cheever

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle."

Lillian Hellman

"Nothing you write, if you hope it to be any good, will come out as first hoped."