This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.
—Cyril Connolly
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
—David Sedaris
Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.
—Edith Wharton
She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.
—Edward Gibbon
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
—Elaine Liner
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
—Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
—Florence Nightingale
If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
—Fran Lebowitz
Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
—George Ade
Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
—Unknown
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
—Unknown
Male writers get asked what they think, women what they feel.
—Eleanor Catton
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
—Seneca
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
—Gertrude Stein