A good story should have incidents, which defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible.

John Buchan

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

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us

Franz Kafka

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

There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not find in the novel — an intense awareness of human loneliness.

Frank O’Connor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O%27Connor

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

Rose Tremain

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

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

William Styron

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

Don’t ask who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.

Giorgos Seferis

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

It’s hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Theodore Roosevelt

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

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