Daily Quota

"What are stories? Are they not opiates for cowards' lives? I would rather invent some little instrument, or build a plank bridge across a muddy stream, than write the best of them."

Morley Roberts, in The Anticipator

And on that encouraging note, I shall cease for a bit quotations about writing.

Daily Quota

"I have heard rumours to the effect that there are people who actually enjoy writing. Can this be true? I loathe it. All that work and at the end of it some slim volume. What is the point, I ask myself?"

Lytton Strachey (quoted in the film Carrington starring Jonathan Pryce).

Daily Quota

"A book is written that it may be read. The first duty of a story is to keep him who peruses it awake."

H Rider Haggard

Daily Quota

"I suppose that my actual working hours are about three hours daily but, of course, I am thinking of the book I have on hand most of the other time."

Hugh Walpole

Daily Quota

"I feel worried if I haven't written at least two pages a day of whatever book I'm currently writing."

Jacqueline Wilson, author of 80+ books

Daily Quota

"Writing a book is like driving by night on a twisty, unknown road, and you can only see as far ahead as the headlights reach. And with me that ain't far. I usually begin by putting the main characters in a crisis of some sort and then see what happens."

Bernard Cornwell

Daily Quota

"The writing of sheer rot is the greatest sport on Earth and I mean to do it again and again!"

Arthur Ransome

Daily Quota

"A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't."

Irvin S Cobb

Daily Quota

"You do not put yourself into your writing. You find yourself there."

Alan Bennett

Daily Quota

"You just put characters into dreadful situations and torment them."

Fantasy writer Cherith Baldry on the craft of writing

Daily Quota

"Editorial experience taught me that the test of a manuscript lies in its first twenty lines. If the writer could say nothing in those first twenty lines to arrest my attention, it was not worth while continuing."

Jerome K Jerome, Confessions of a Humorist