When I was a little boy they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Of course, I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.

Dorothy Parker

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

The wound is the place where the light enters.

Rumi

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

Life is mostly froth and bubble.

Two things stand like stone.

Kindness in another’s trouble.

Courage in your own.

Adam Lindsay Gordon

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

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

(opening lines of Anna Karenina)

Leo Tolstoy

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

All of life is maintenance for heaven’s sake. That’s the pleasant part. Taking care of things.

Armistead Maupin

(Said by Anna Madrigal in Significant Others, part of Tales of the City)

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

I think that you can be taught to write. You can’t be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can’t be given to you.

James Salter

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

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different for that which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

T. S. Eliot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Sometimes it’s important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it’s essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision that day simply consists of choosing which colour to slide down on the rainbow.

Douglas Pagels

https://www.douglaspagels.com/