The Book Hotel at The Falstaff, Ramsgate

"It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism."

Mary Robinette Kowal

"Read 'Becoming a Writer', by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out."

Hilary Mantel

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

John Steinbeck

"But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a writer."

Ursula Le Guin

"I have been absolutely terrified of my life — and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do."

Georgia O'Keeffe

"Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, or compose, or paint can manage to escape the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

Graham Greene

"You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at."

W.H. Auden

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Albert Camus

"How do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances."

Toni Morrison

"We need the tonic of wildness."

Thoreau

"I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky."

Virginia Woolf

"I like people to have a little nonsense about them."

L.M. Montgomery

"The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

W.B. Yeats

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring."

Alexander Pope