Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

William Faulkner

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a nam

William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

V.S. Naipaul

Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.

Willa Cather