After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
—George Ade
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Television has raised writing to a new low.
—Samuel Goldwyn
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
—Bobby Knight
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
—Joan Didion
I have twenty-one pages, unusable, unprintable, destructive of the book as my mind still partly sees it, contradictory of character and inconsistent in tone. But I am undoubtedly started.
—Janet Burroway
I have spent a good many years . . . being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
—Stephen King
I lived in the midst of an affectionate, charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to write.
—Katharine Butler Hathaway
Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
—Jessamyn West
The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people. I've gotten back at lawyers, prosecutors, judges, law professors, and politicians. I just line 'em up and shoot 'em.
—John Grisham
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
—Charles Bukowski
Writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.
—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
All writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flopping on the clothes-peg of his exclamation mark.
—Paul Theroux