“I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” —Herman Wouk
“I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploration that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. … I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.” —Erica Jong
“I threw the thesaurus out years ago. I found that every time you look up a word, if you want some word and you can think of an approximately close synonym for it and look it up, you only get cliché usages. It’s much better to use a big dictionary and look up derivations and definitions of various usages of a different word.” —James Jones
“I think writing verse is a great training for a writer. It teaches you to make your points and get your stuff clear, which is the great thing.” —P.G. Wodehouse
“When I really do not know what I am saying, or how to say it, I’ll open these Pentels, these colored Japanese pens, on yellow lined paper, and I’ll start off with very tentative colors, very light colors: orange, yellow, or tan. … When my thoughts are more formulated, and I have a sharper sense of trying to say it, I’ll go into heavier colors: blues, greens, and eventually into black. When I am writing in black, which is the final version, I have written that sentence maybe twelve or fifteen or eighteen times.” —Gay Talese
“I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer: talent, luck, discipline. … [Discipline] is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” —Michael Chabon
“If I’m at a dull party I’ll invent some kind of game for myself and then pick someone to play it with so that I am, in effect, writing a scene. I’m supplying my half of the dialogue and hoping the other half comes up to standards. If it doesn’t, I try to direct it that way.” —Evan Hunter
“I’ll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer’s Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. This is the kind of puzzle that interests me, keeps me going, and it will even suggest how to describe a girl’s hair, at least some of it will come, but I must keep to that page. I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There’s a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from page 167 in W.J. Wilkinson’s Malay English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed this. The thing you see, it suggests what pictures are on the wall, what color somebody’s wearing, and as most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you’re not doing anything naughty, you’re really normally doing what nature does, you’re just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers.” —Anthony Burgess
“The conclusion to be drawn is that I am happiest writing in small rooms. They make me feel comfortable and secure. And it took me years to figure out that I need to write in a corner. Like a small animal burrowing into its hole, I shift furniture around, and back myself into a cozy corner, with my back to the wall … and then I can write.” —Danielle Steel
“I try to keep my space very, very contained, because I feel that inspiration and the spirits and the story and the characters live there for as long as I’m writing.” —Isabel Allende
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” —Larry L. King