“Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.”
“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”
“The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.”
“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”
“Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.”
“A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.”
“What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.”
“Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”
“It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.”
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
“Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”
“This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”
“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”
“If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.”
“Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.”
“The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.”
“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”
“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
“I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.”
“The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.”
“I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”
“Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.”
“Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
“Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.”
“Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?”
“If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.”
“A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”