I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing

I loved the process of writing.
Nora Roberts

I am a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
Nora Roberts

Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing.
Nora Roberts

I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.
Nora Roberts

I believe strongly in writing groups such as Romance Writers Of America that offer support, information and networking.
Nora Roberts

I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.
Nora Roberts

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
Frank McCourt

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
Frank McCourt

I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
Frank McCourt

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Augusten Burroughs

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.
Augusten Burroughs

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra Pound

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Jorge Luis Borges