A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry

Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.

Nadine Gordimer

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

The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time.

Thomas A. Edison

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

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.

Julian Barnes

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

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Samuel Johnson

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

I think what I love most (about writing) is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

Andre Dubus III

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

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers.

Stan Barstow

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

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

Frances Willard

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

I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Ken Kesey

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