I'd like to start a new thread that everyone and anyone can add to- the best quotes about writing, from writers old and new. I think my current favourites are:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly past.
(Douglas Adams)

or:

If you look at anything long enough- that wall in front of you- it will come out of that wall.
(Chekhov)

or quite possibly:

Never throw up on an editor.
(Ellen Datlow)

I tried to Google the one I have above my desk, which I think EmmaD brought to my attention ages ago.

It was Robert Presnell to Martha Gelhorn in 1953:

Who is the judge that sits perpetually in your head? Wrote those lines, you silly fool; they are all yours, both the good and the bad, and no one exists in purity and essence. Write the bad lines if only to keep writing. Writing is lonely, wretched, unheralded, often meaningless, insignificant and too often devoid of even an masturbatory pleasure, mean though that is. Write, Martha, and stop crying at the cold. You've wept long enough.

Sorry, it's a bit long! But I do love those words.

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Couldn;t find it online, weirdly...

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Sorry, should be 'write those lines'

Oh, I *love* quotes about writing. One of my current favs is from Annie Dillard, in 'The Writing Life.'

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better."

Ah that's wonderful, Michelle!

Caroline - The Writing Life is wonderful, I fell in love with something she said on almost every page.

"Write the bad lines, if only to keep writing"

- that's very true, isn't it? You don't get the good lines without getting the bad, too (sadly!).

"A blank page is God's way of telling you how hard it is to be God."

"It doesn't matter if you write badly, as long as you edit brilliantly"

Can't remember who said either of these!

Love that quote, Michelle!

OOh I like that one Bunbry!

It doesn't matter if you write badly, as long as you edit brilliantly"

"It doesn't matter if you write badly, as long as you edit brilliantly"

I'm so going to put that above my desk at work. Or maybe on my office door

Oh, these are all lovely... I want to print them out in huge font and put them on my office wall for my brand new undergrad students to see so that they stop hating their academic writing and see it as something that can be creative and emotional and beautiful!

'There are no rules in creative writing, it either works, or it doesn't.

Don't know who said it, but my current fave is "Write your first draft for yourself, your second for your reader and your third for your agent."

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But I do also love the one about writing a novel being like the way you can drive all the way home in the dark, by the light of headlights which only illuminate the road for fifty yards in front of you.

I always related it to Virginia Woolf's image of writing a novel being like going into a room which is full of furniture, with only a torch in your hand: you're finding out everything about the room, by that single beam.

Sit on your bottom and get it done.
(the original is 'ass', but hey, we're Brits.)

In other words: don't procrastinate.

Emma, I think this

I always related it to Virginia Woolf's image of writing a novel being like going into a room which is full of furniture, with only a torch in your hand: you're finding out everything about the room, by that single beam

sounds also like a fab writing exercise...

If you're getting anxious about the possibility of never succeeding in matching your fiction to today's often facile and Twittery environment, Mary McCarthy's words might be reassuring:

If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don't be alarmed - date it.