Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

- Charles Caleb Colson

Because it's so easy to copy anything, a lot of people have convinced themselves that they shouldn't have to pay for it. Well, the reason you get paid is because the people who sit all day long at their desks creating books and songs and software have mortgages. And if you're only going to sell one copy of everything and then the world is going to make a gazillion pirated copies off of it, it's going to be really hard to pay your mortgage.

- Pat Schroeder

Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

- Judy Collins

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

- Jules Renard

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

- Gloria Steinem

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

- Judy Collins

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

- Joyce Carol Oates

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

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can't teach someone who writes columns to care.

- Ellen Goodman

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

- Thomas Mann

Writing is a voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks our hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name.

- Judy Collins

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

- Josh Billings

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

- Ralph Ellison

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

- Charlotte Bronte



Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

- A. A. Milne



Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

- Truman Capote



Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

- Alan Dean Foster



Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

- Walter Cronkite



With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

- James Thurber



Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. You may read selections to sensible women, -- if young the better.

- Amos Bronson Alcott



In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

- Will Rogers



A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

- Aldous Huxley



Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

- Anne Sullivan



Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

- Jules Renard



And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

- T. S. Eliot



I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

- V. S. Naipaul



I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

- V. S. Naipaul



I allow my intuition to lead my path.

- Manuel Puig



What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

- Manuel Puig



Write what you care about.

- Sara Paretsky



The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

- Aldous Huxley



Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

- T. S. Eliot



Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

- Blaise Pascal



Writers will happen in the best of families.

- Rita Mae Brown



One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

- Denise Levertov



The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

- Albert Camus



Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

- Frances Hodgson Burnett



Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov



Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

- Flannery O'Connor



How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

- Henry David Thoreau



Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

- Oscar Wilde



History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

- Winston Churchill