A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
~ Richard Bach

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
~ Gaston Bachelard

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
~ Walter Bagehot

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To ''Why am I here?'' To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.
~ Enid Bagnold

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
~ Renata Adler

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
~ Brian Aldiss

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
~ Nelson Algren

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
~ Martin Amis

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
~ Margaret Anderson

To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.
~ Aristotle

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
~ Isaac Asimov

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
~ W. H. Auden

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
~ W. H. Auden

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
~ James Baldwin

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
~ James Baldwin

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
~ Roland Barthes

On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
~ Charles Baudelaire

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
~ Saul Bellow

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.
~ Robert Benchley

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
~ Robert Benchley