“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”

“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

“The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”

Alan Dean Foster (1946) American fiction writer

“On your best day, you're only as good as I am on my worst with one arm tied behind my back.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

“I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“Whether I’m in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I’m happy.”

Chris Colfer (1990) actor, singer, book author