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

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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)

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

William Faulkner

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Mark Twain

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

Ernest Hemingway