“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around”  Philip Roth

“Do painting, cycling, movies, friends after writing” Henry Miller

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no more impressive than sailing single-handed around the world” Tom Clancy

“Failure: Is it a limitation? Bad timing? It’s a lot of things. It’s something you can’t be afraid of, because you’ll stop growing. The next step beyond failure could be your biggest success in life”  Debbie Allen

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie” Stephen King

“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves”  Lillian Hellman

“Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs” Jack Lynch

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. . .Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph”  Mark Twain