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| Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon. | | Henry Louis Mencken | |
| My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. | | Ernest Hemingway | |
| No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one | | Robert Byrne | |
| Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals | | Marcel Proust | |
| Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. | | Ernest Hemingway | |
| She writes like a loom, producing her broad rich fabric with hardly a thought of how it will make up into a shape, while I write to cover a frame of ideas. | | H. G. Wells | |
| 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 | |
| Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary. | | Jessamyn West | |
| Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second. | | Robert Frost | |
| That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time | | Charles Caleb Colton | |
| The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. | | Ralph Ellison | |
| The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. | | Robert Louis Stevenson | |
| The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties. | | Thomas Jefferson | |
| The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. | | T.S. Eliot | |
| 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 only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write | | Michel de Montaigne | |
| The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought | | Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
| The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. | | Elias Canetti | |
| The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too. | | William Saroyan | |
| The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice | | Mark Twain | |
