Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Mark Twain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug in the world.

Rudyard Kipling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

John le Carré

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Lorraine Hansberry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry

Sit down and put everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

Colette

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette

There ain’t nothing more to write about and I’m rotten glad of it, because if I’d know’d what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn’t a tackled it.

Mark Twain (from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

There’s a marvellous peace in not publishing….When you publish the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it to yourself.

J.D. Salinger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger