Robert Frost 'The Figure a Poem Makes'

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."

'The Writer's Chapbook'

"The purpose of fiction is to help us answer the questions we must constantly be asking ourselves: who do we think we are and what do we think we're doing?"

Robert Stone 

Janet Frame

"The thing which prompts you to sit down to write must be something which haunts you."

Why Writers Write

"There has to be an irritation that makes you want to cry out. All fiction is, in a funny way, protest fiction."

John Updike