"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
~ Flannery O'Connor
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings."
~ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, often quoted as rephrased by William Faulkner: "Kill all your darlings"
"When a new writer defends his 'style,' the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn't an artifice. Real style — voice — arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer's character. When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation — an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example."
~ Bill Roorbach
"The ego is a primitive device installed in your brain to tell you when to flee from tigers. Unless you regularly interview tigers, it will misinform you during any interview, hectoring you with concerns about your next question or whether you dressed properly."
~ Eric Nalder, Loosening Lips
"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
~ Ernest Hemingway
"Technique alone is never enough.You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."
~ Raymond Chandler
"Writing freezes thought and offers it up for inspection."
~ Jack Rosenthal
