"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."
— E.B. White (Charlotte's Web)

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky."
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
— Flannery O'Connor

"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."
— Gordon B. Hinckley

"A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to."
— Tom Bissell

"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."
— Anne Lamott

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paper work."
— Peter Devries

"Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
— Margaret Chittenden

"Writers write while dreamers procastinate. "
— Besa Kosova

"Writing well mean never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.' "
— Jef Mallett

"Writers will happen in the best of families."
— Rita Mae Brown

"The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.'"
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

". . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them."
— Kim Addonizio

"I wasn't born to cook or clean,
but to read and write,
if you don't like me the way I am,
then go fly a kite."
— Besa Kosova

"I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers."
— Sylvia Plath

"A writer is a reader moved to emulation."
— Saul Bellow

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."
— William S. Burroughs (The Adding Machine: Selected Essays)

"Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them."
— Blaise Pascal

"I am a writer who came froma sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."
— Eudora Welty (On Writing)

"Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."
— T.C. Boyle

"Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm."
— Charlotte Brontë

"It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again."
— Dan Barden

"Choose an author as you choose a friend."
— Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon

"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."
— Aldous Huxley

"There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there."
— Pamela Ribon

"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
— Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

"Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?"
— Colson Whitehead

"There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it's because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course. Writers want to be special, because they're so not. They're losers, overgrown kids who've never escaped from being misfits and who have run away into their own imaginations in an attempt to find self-esteem. Why do you think they all star in their own books? Self included."
— Chancery Stone

"Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again."
— Italo Calvino

"Pen-bereavement is a serious matter."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves."
— Roy Blount Jr.

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."
— Fran Lebowitz

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."
— Simone Weil

"Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation. "
— Patrick Dennis (Auntie Mame)

" Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs. "
— Christopher Hampton

" I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape.
(James Meek in interview with TMO)"
— James Meek