Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. ~ Anne Lamott
Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others. ~ Anne Lamott
Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. ~ Anne Lamott
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. ~ Anne Lamott
There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Rejections don’t really hurt after you stop bleeding, and even a rejection serves to introduce the writer’s name to an editor, particularly if a rejected story is competently written. ~ Isaac Asimov
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
– Robert Benchley
Write to be Understood: If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Have the Guts to Cut : If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
