A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)? -Brian Aldiss
The story…must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person.-Maxwell Anderson
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.- James Baldwin
When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he’ll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.-Sherwood Anderson
Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions – what we do – that we are happy or the reverse….All human happiness and misery take the form of action.-Aristotle
No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.-Isaac Asimov
To most readers the word ‘fiction’ is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author’s part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.-Louis Auchincloss
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer–and if so, why?-Bennett Cerf
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.Trust your demon.-Roger Zelazny
For me, writing [was] a question of survival…I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.-Gao Xingjian
WISE Words 