Betsy Byars, on writing:

 

When I type a title page,

I hold it and I look at it and I think,
I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.
- Betsy Byars.

Nancy Kress, on writing:

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

- Nancy Kress. 

Mildred D. Taylor, on writing:

I do not know how old I was when the daydreams became more than that,

and I decided to write them down,

but by the time I entered high school,

I was confident that I would one day be a writer.

- Mildred D. Taylor.

Ann Patchett, on reading:

 

Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book.

Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point.
The reader and the book have their own relationship now,
and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
- Ann Patchett.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, on books:

 

I am simply a 'book drunkard.'
Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee.
I cannot withstand them.
- Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Mary Lee Settle, on writing:

 

I start with a question.
Then try to answer it.
- Mary Lee Settle.

Margaret Culkin Banning, on writing:

 

Fiction is not a dream.

Nor is it guesswork.
It is imagining based on facts,
and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up.
- Margaret Culkin Banning.

Andy Ihnatko, on writing:

Writing is hard.

That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things.

And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.

- Andy Ihnatko.

Zelda Popkin, on writing:

 

Inspiration is just one requirement for being a writer.

Another is keeping regular working hours.
- Zelda Popkin.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, on writing:

My crime books are actually novels and are written as such.

One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader,
and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.
- Mary Roberts Rinehart.

P. D. James, on writing:

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us.

I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

- P. D. James.

Julia Alvarez, on writing:

It's like my whole world is coming undone,

but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread,

and I'm stitching the scraps back together.

– Julia Alvarez. 

Ann Patchett, on writing:

 

I'm very comfortable writing.

- Ann Patchett.

Virginia Hamilton, on writing:

I can’t explain how it is I keep having new ideas.

But one book inevitably follows another.
It is my way of exploring the known,
the remembered,
and the imagined,
the literary triad of which all stories are made.
- Virginia Hamilton.

Frank Herbert, on writing:

 

There is no real ending.
It's just the place where you stop the story.
- Frank Herbert.
 

P. D. James, on writing:

 

Don't just plan to write - write.

It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
- P. D. James.
 

When you read a line that is so well-written, you just close the book and stare at the wall for a minute...

When you read a line that is so well-written, you just close the book and stare at the wall for a minute... 
- Anonymous.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, on writing:

 

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

- Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Anne Lamott, on books:

 

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.

What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.

They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

- Anne Lamott.

P. D. James, on words:

Increase your word power.

Words are the raw material of our craft.

- P. D. James.