"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." —Thomas Mann
“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.” — Raymond Chandler
"Beauty is the purgation of superfluities." —Michelangelo Buonarroti
"Throw your heart into the picture and then jump in after it." —Howard Pyle
'A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance. The script exists for that. Everything does.' — Robert Towne
"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." —E.L. Doctorow
"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." —E.L. Doctorow
"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." —Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind." —William Butler Yeats
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." —Cyril Connolly
"Creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination, and if any one of those elements is missing, it doesn't work… Lest we forget, while you're writing, you're not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation? I don't find it that splendid." —Bob Dylan
"When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Riviera, I make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, Ed Whelan, or whatever my hero’s name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars. . . This actually living the lives of my characters takes up quite a lot of time and makes it a little difficult to write anything. It was not until I decided to tell stories about old men who just sit in their rooms and shell walnuts that I ever got around to doing any work." —Robert Benchley