If you need a little inspiration going into the weekend, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite tips from a few notable writers. Some suggestions may contradict each other, which is the funny thing about advice. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide who to listen to.

Ray Bradbury

“Write with gusto.”

“Feed the muse daily.”

“Do the work you were born to do—and no one else’s.”

Neil Gaiman

“Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.”

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”

Jack Kerouac

“Submissive to everything, open, listening.”

“Be in love with yr life.”

“Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind.”

“Accept loss forever.”

“Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it.”

Henry Miller

“Work on one thing at a time until finished.”

“Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”

“When you can’t create you can work.”

“Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”

Zadie Smith

“When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.”

“Don’t romanticism your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.”

“Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.”

“Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

Susan Sontag

“A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?”

“To be a great writer, know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm) [and] have moral intelligence—which creates true authority in a writer.”

“If I am not able to write because I’m afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad writer. At least I’ll be writing. Then something else will happen. It always does.”

John Steinbeck

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

“Write as freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

“Start as close to the end as possible.”

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”