Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Margaret Atwood

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

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another.

John Dos Passos

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

The Reason I Write

The reason I write

is to make something

as beautiful as you are

When I’m with you

I want to be the kind of hero

I wanted to be

when I was seven years old

a perfect man

who kills.

Leonard Cohen

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

People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Haruki Murakami

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

First, a mistress that you dally and play with, then she becomes your master and finally your tyrant.

Winston Churchill (on writing a book).

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

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”

John Greenleaf Whittier

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

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have the talent for luck.

Hector Berlioz

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

A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps, I put into a story a line like “he got out of the car and walked across the sun drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cold water.” They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: it just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up from the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.

Raymond Chandler

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

The only things worth writing about are love and murder.

Aksel Sandemose

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