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• Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien
  
  
• Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain
  
  
• I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener
  
  
• The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain
  
  
• The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
  
  
• Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938
  
  
• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth
  
  
• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov
  
  
• If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison
  
  
• What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931
  
  
• It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West
  
  
• Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien
  
  
• Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us the sense of weight and purpose, ~ Eric Hoffer wrote in The Passionate State of Mind almost 50 years ago.
  
  
• Words not only affect us temporarily, they change us, ~ David Riesman wrote in the essay Storytellers as Tutors in the 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd.