Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Arthur Helps

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

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

V.S. Pritchett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Pritchett

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal

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

If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whatever, But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original.

Gary Panter

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

We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.

Francis Ford Coppola

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

It is better to take what doesn’t belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Mark Twain

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

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life, it can come in glancingly from the side.

Emma Donoghue

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

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Iris Murdoch

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

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

William Inge

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

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Jean Cocteau

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