'Sure I wait for the Muse. And I make damn sure she arrives at 9am every morning.'

Not sure who, think it might be Morton Feldman.

Emma

My favourite is from Thomas Mann: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other
people.”

smudger

If a doctor told me I had five minutes to live? I'd write a little faster...

Isaac Asimov.

By Elmore Leonard, when asked what good writing is, who replied 'lots of white space on the page'

Andrea

Some good ones - apologies for any repetition:-

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

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friederich Nietzsche

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler [not sure I agree with this one!]

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt
Sylvia Plath

RAY BRADBURY writing quotes:

"WORK. RELAXATION. DON'T THINK!"

“Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.”

“I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true -- hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.”

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall”

“My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.”

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.”

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse."

"Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter."

"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."

"All that stuff that's collected up in my head -- poetry and mythology and comic strips and science fiction magazines -- comes out in my stories. So you get to a certain age and you're like a pomegranate, you just burst. And the ideas spill out."

"If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both -- you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

“You fail only if you stop writing”

"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed."

"There shouldn't be difficult moments. As soon as things get difficult, I turn on my heel and let the damned idea percolate on its own. I pretend to abandon it! It soon follows and comes to heel. You can't push or pressure ideas. You can't try, ever! You can only do. Doing is everything."

"To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life.You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in glorious fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction and otherwise. Which finally means, maybe you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And, out of that love, remake a world."

My favourite quote, not a writing quote in itself - but it is to me - as it got me writing this year with a vengeance:

“A Sound of Thunder.”

Ste

A couple, from 'Writing Poems' by Peter Sansom:

'bad poems...are not true. They do not genuinely say what they geniunely need to say'

- and comparing Johnson to Carlos Williams' Red Wheelbarrow:

'we tend to want poems more to explore than to confirm ideas'.

Both applicable to any form of writing, I think.

Another, by Craig Raine:

'All bad literature aspires to the condition of literature. All good literature aspires to the condition of life.'

My favourites:

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." - Gloria Steinem (So blooming true!)

"The sky's not the limit -the ground is!" - Can't remember who said this

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window." - Burton Rascoe

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke." ~Arthur Polotnik

And finally one that never fails to make me laugh...

"An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff." - Adlai Stevenson

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Usually attributed to Samuel Johnson.

Dee

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier, nobler and more enriching.
Harlan Ellison

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friederich Nietzsche

JB