As an aspiring writer one of the things I do often is of course read! Truth be told I was a reader long before I aspired to ever write. Below is a collection of some of my favorite quotes from various writes and brilliant minds that I admire greatly. I find whether I am stuck on a verse, chapter or life someone somewhere has articulated the insight into what I am feeling. Enjoy!

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.-Gaston Bachelard

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.-Buddha

The pen is the tongue of the mind.-Miguel de Cervantes

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.-Arthur C. Clarke

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.-Joan Cocteau

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.-Isabel Colegate

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.-Charles Caleb Colton

I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian.-David Cronenberg

A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.-Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.-Joan Didion

Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility.-Gösta Carl Henrik Ehrensvärd

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.-Albert Einstein

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. The important thing is not to stop questioning.-Albert Einstein

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. -T. S. Eliot

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.-Jules Feifer

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?-E. M. Forster

If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author.-Neil Gaiman

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.-Max Gropius

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.-Elbert Hubbard

Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.-Stephen King

Authors who never give you something to disagree with never give you anything to think about.-Michael LaRocca

Stupidity is no excuse of not thinking.-Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't.-Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Genius is not a quality, but only a quantitative difference in a combination of attributes contained in all persons.-Dr. Ernst Jones

The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.-Jean Malaquais

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.-Anais Nin

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.-George Bernard Shaw

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.-Edwin Schlossberg

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.-Henry David Thoreau

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.-Mark Twain

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.-Gore Vidal

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.-Kurt Vonnegut

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.-Oscar Wilde

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.-Tobias Wolff

Writing is thinking on paper.-William Zinsser