Perfect title.

KURT VONNEGUT

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.

I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

ITALO CALVINO

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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

MARGARET ATWOOD

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I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

A writer’s work is the product of laziness, you see. A writer’s work essentially consists of taking his mind off things, of thinking about something else, of daydreaming, of not being in any hurry to go to sleep but to imagine something … And then comes the actual writing, and that’s his trade. That is, I don’t think the two things are incompatible. Besides, I think that when one is writing something that’s more or less good, one doesn’t feel it to be a chore; one feels it to be a form of amusement. A form of amusement that doesn’t exclude the use of intelligence, just as chess doesn’t exclude it.

IAN McEWAN

Every sentence contains a ghostly commentary on its own processes.

LUCAS HUNT from “A Story Sung - Why Fiction Writers Should Read Poetry”

Any writer who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that holds the spirit. Poetry has the essence of life in it.

Yet because small seeds grow tall trees, baby bricks make big buildings, and single moments have the power to change lives; poetry and fiction have a crucial relationship. It is a matter of fertility, potency, and efficacy. A novel becomes greater than the sum of its chapters when it has the blood and guts of poetry in it. Then people really feel what they read, and understand the meaning of the story on different levels.

D. H. LAWRENCE from a letter to Cynthia Asquith, 1913

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.