The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” - Tom Stoppard
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - Ernest Hemingway
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” - JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” -Toni Morrison
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” -Anais Nin
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” -Mark Twain
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” Stephen King
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” -Aldous Huxley
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” -Anton Chekhov
"A good writer writes with a camera, not a pen." -Robert Newton Peck
"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new." -Samuel Johnson
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” -Sylvia Plath
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” -Ernest Hemingway
“A word after a word after a word is power.” -Margaret Atwood