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| Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors | | Benjamin Franklin | |
| Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood | | Friedrich Nietzsche | |
| Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. | | W. H. Auden | |
| Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise. | | Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
| That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers. | | Gore Vidal | |
| The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see -- every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. | | Graham Greene | |
| The man who ventures to write contemporary history must expect to be attacked both for everything he has said and everything he has not said | | Voltaire | |
| The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough | | William Saroyan | |
| The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside | | Samuel Johnson | |
| The really great writers are people like Emily Brontė who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination. | | James A. Michener | |
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| The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. | | John Steinbeck | |
| The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money. | | Karl Marx | |
| The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price | | Walter Lippmann | |
| There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. | | Quentin Crisp | |
| There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets | | Samuel Johnson | |
| To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. | | Woody Allen | |
| While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best | | Samuel Johnson | |
| Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals. | | John Steinbeck | |
