Anais Ninn:  

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

Charles Peguy:  

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Edmund Morrison:

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Epiclertus:

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Ernest Hemingway:

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Fannie Hurst:

I’m not happy when I’m writing, but I’m more unhappy when I’m not.

Gloria Steinem:

I do not like to write, but I like to have written.

Henry David Thoreau:

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Mary Heaton Vorse:

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Mary Higgins Clark:

As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.

Orson Scott Card:

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Ray Bradbury:

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you

Richard Harding Davis:

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way, or to say a new thing in an old way.

Rita Mae Brown:

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.

Robert Frost:

A poem... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness... it finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Samuel Johnson:

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Lover:

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure him but the scratch of a pen.

Stephen Vincent Benét was asked how it felt to write John Brown’s Body, he answered:

Just about like giving birth to a grand piano.

Sydney Smith:

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written: you have no idea what vigour it will give you.

Sylvia Plath:

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Thomas Mann:

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

Turgenev:

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.

Vorse M Heaton:

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Walter Davenport:

(An editor is) A person who knows precisely want he wants but isn’t quite sure.