I was fretting too much over that opening sentence. I worked on it scrupulously, thinking that if I could only get the first sentense right, the rest of the book would come easy. That was a big mistake. Weeks went by with my staring at blank paper and getting nowhere. One day I decided to just start writing in the style of the Dick and Jane first grade readers. Simple little words, without bothering about style or polish - just to get the story on paper. I started writing, "There is a little town on a hill called Santa Vittoria. It is in Italy. The people in the town grow grapes and make wine. One day, not too ong ago..." and so on. It worked fine. Soon I was writing like mad all day long. The pages began to pile up and I felt better.
Robert Crichton

"Once when I was working in a creativity worship in Iowa, an older woman wanted desperately to write poetry about her youth in rural corn country. I asked her what she used to do that she would like to write about. Among her answers was "husking corn". I told her to wait and I dashed out and bought a half dozen ears of corn in a supermarket. When I returned I had her sit as she used to and encouraged her to visualize the setting. With her eyes closed, and sitting as she remembered, I had her husk corn. In less than ten minutes she produced her first poem. Within an hour she had written nearly a dozen.
Bob Samples

The total life of the writer is the source of his work, all of these go into his writing in varying quantities: the sense, as of taste and touch, the rate of metabolism, blood pressure, the digestion, body temperature, the memory of things past, perhaps going back to the childhood not only of the writer but of the race itself. The success of his work depends on the liveliness and alertness of his brain, previous reading of books, shrewdness of insight into human character, his ear for the sound of language. The writer, therefore, must have a more than ordinary capacity for life and the power to retain what he experiences."
Paul Engle

You will write, she said, if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition."
Gertrude Stein