WRITING QUOTES FROM ESPRESSO BOT

"Whatever you choose to call it, staring into the abyss in search of an idea can be terrifying. " 
Colin Nissan (Don't Be That Guy)

"Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track."
John Gregory Dunne (Nothing Lost)

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake, he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
Umberto Eco

"Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life."
Hunter S. Thompson

"If I stop working and just try to enjoy myself, I get very neurotic and guilt-ridden. Orwell was the same." 
Arthur Koestler (The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation)

"I write slowly because I write badly. I have to rewrite everything many, many times just to achieve mediocrity."
William Gass (The Tunnel)

"People underestimate the power of writing in terms of why certain arguments stick and why they don't...My objective as a writer is not merely to write in such a way that people read it and say, 'Yeah, I think that's correct. It's to write in such a way that people are haunted. That they go to bed thinking about it, that they wake up thinking about, that they tell their spouses about it, that they tell their children and their friends about it. That they grab them by the arm and say, 'You got to read this.'"
Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer)

"Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing."
P.D. James

"Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket."
William Golding

"Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them."
Harlan Ellison

"Most of us find our own voices only after we've sounded like a lot of other people."
Neil Gaiman

"Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead."
Sinclair Lewis

"Tell the whole truth. Don't be lazy, don't be afraid. Close the critic out when you are drafting something new."
Jane Kenyon (Let evening come)

"I want to be read. I want to be valued. That is perhaps the only shot at immortality a human being can have. "
Anne Rice

"It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them."
Nora Ephron

"Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun."
Christina Rossetti (19th century poet)

"I'm not too keen on characters taking over, they do as they are damn well told."
Iain Banks (The Wasp Factory)

"Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breath life into it, they'll know it too."
Esther Freud (Doctor Who:Attack of the Cyberman)

"I approach the work as though, in truth, I'm nothing and the words are everything."
Louise Erdrich

"You know what about writing? It doesn't have any walls."
Lidia Yuknavitch (The Night Watchman)

"Along the way accidents happen, detours get taken - the accidents turn out to be some of the best things."
John Irving

"Write toward vulnerability"
Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird)

"Write about the emotions you fear the most."
Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak, Shout)

"Writing is thinking, and if you don't think clearly about what you want to say, what story you want to tell, you will never write clearly about it."
Kevin Coyne (musician)

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."
James Baldwin (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it.”

Ernest Hemingway

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” 

Anton Chekhov

“If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed.”

Barry Lopez 

“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.” 

Elizabeth Bowen

“Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing.”

Zadie Smith

“Here's how to write a mystery novel: at the beginning you tell a lie, and by the end you tell the truth.” Gregory McDonald

“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.” Rebecca West

“Above all things—read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.” 

Ngaio Marsh

“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time.” 

Geoff Dyer

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.” 

Jack Kerouac

“The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion…in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.” 

Jules Renard

“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”

 Bernard Malamud

“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.” 

Sydney Smith

“The most critical thing that a story must do—the tippity-top of the narrative mountain!—is make the audience feel something.” 

Chuck Wendig

“I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that’s what you do.” 

Theodore Sturgeon