Quoth the Writer

I thought it might be a good day for a quote collection. Here's what a couple of writers have to say--about (mostly) writing, naturally.

Richard Peck:

• Writing is the art of listening.
• All fiction is a search for family.
• All American stories are about journey and change.
• When adult authority fails, kids will set up a peer over themselves.
• The only way you can write is in the light of the burning bridges behind you.
• You learn the most from the experience you would have avoided if you could.
• Nobody ever grows up in a group.
• Every character you create has a lesson to teach you.
• I am a writer because I did not come from a child-centered home.
• Anybody who thinks a small town is friendly lives in a big city.
• The first chapter is the last chapter in disguise.

John Gardner:

• All writing requires at least some measure of trancelike state.
• Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer's gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works.
• ...every good writer knows that getting down one's exact meaning helps one to discover what one means.
• The unpromising writer sees derivatively.
• The beginning novelist who has the gift for inhabiting other lives has perhaps the best chance for success.
• If he takes enough English literature courses, the young would-be writer can learn to block every true instinct he has.
• The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent.
• Born writers [are] people who value other human activities but have no wish to do anything but write. 
• The true young novelist has the stamina, patience, and single-mindedness of a draft horse.
• What keeps the young writer with the potential for success from turning aside to some more generally approved, perhaps easier path is the writing community.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?