Good description is a learned skill, one of those primary reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing. - Stephen King

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph, a novel is a film. - Lorrie Moore

Writing long sentences is like adding water to tea; the more words, the weaker the message. - Diana Booher

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it. - Jonathan Culver

I think sometimes we give people a lot of credit just because they’re writing nice sentences, even if it isn’t adding up to much. - James Patterson

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don’t know how to write sentences. - Tom Robbins

Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock. - B.J. Chute

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it. - Lynne Truss

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. - Mark Twain

The beauty of type lies in its utility; prettiness without readability serves neither the author nor the reader. - James Felici

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday. - John H. McWhorter

For more than three years I wrote more than 400 words every day. I mean, every calendar day. If, in those pre-portable days, I couldn’t get to a keyboard, I wrote hard the previous night and caught up the following day, and if it ever seemed that it was easy to do the average I upped the average. - Terry Pratchett

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. - Virginia Woolf

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. - Mortimer J. Adler

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. - Frank Herbert

Some battles are best fought with a sidekick. - Krista Ritchie

A hero is a person who says yes to adventure. - Kendra Levin

In many ways, a book is, in itself, a tiny universe. Each page is like a newly formed galaxy, fashioned from a single, pulsing thought. A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time. - Lang Leav

There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before. - Joseph Campbell