Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

— Philip K. Dick

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

— William Faulkner

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting…

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people…

— Orson Scott Card

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people…

— Alice Munro

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

— Orson Scott Card

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

— William Faulkner

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

— Anthony Burgess

Exercise the writing muscle every day.

— Jane Yolen

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

— Larry Niven

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

— George Orwell

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

— W. Somerset Maugham

If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all…

— David Brin