This is what some well-known writers had to say about writing and editing:

“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.”  –Mark Twain

“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”  –Gertrude Stein

“Don’t let editors edit the life out of your sentences!” -Isaac Asimov

“You must write every single day of your life…I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.” -Ray Bradbury

“Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” -Stephen King

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”  –Lilian Hellman

“I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”   –Dorothy Parker

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” -Maya Angelou

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”  –Red Smith

“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”  –Raymond Chandler

“An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”  -T.S. Eliot

(from “The Writer’s Quotation Book” and “Advice To Writers,” Compiled/edited by Jon Winokur)