On Ryukyu islands, the expert Kara-te practitioners, used their skills to subdue, control and generally teach bullies A lesson, rather than severely injure or kill their attackers. They knew full well the consequences of their actions and the trail of blood and retribution that would ensue.

— Soke Behzad Ahmadi

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.).

— John Gardner

I never set out to create a technique. I started out on the floor to find myself, to find what the body could do, and what would give me satisfaction - emotionally, dramatically and bodily. But I did not ever dream of establishing a technique. I still can't believe anything like that happened.

— Martha Graham

As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.

— Leon Trotsky

It follows from all this that there is no technique that can be discovered and applied to make it possible for one to write. If you go to a school where there are classes in writing, these classes should not be to teach you how to write, but to teach you the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due them. One thing that is always with the writer—no matter how long he has written or how good he is—is the continuing process of learning how to write. As soon as the writer 'learns to write,' as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

— Flannery O'Connor

Contained within a given lesson or particular technique is the essence of all techniques. You imitate and study a particular form to grasp the universal principles that allow the technique to work in the first place and that will finally enable you to transcend the form itself to discover the formless.

— H.E. Davey

I used to murder people for money, but these days it’s more of a survival technique.

— Jennifer Estep

People are always trying to understand.There is only one way to do that.It is to discover < + I + >why< + I + > you want to understand.

— Idries Shah

Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.

— Rafael Sabatini

The only known technique to an imitator is to steal and rephrase, then with a mischievous smile, he said, 'I did it', without any confidence and prove.

— Michael Bassey Johnson