A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Richard Bach

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Joseph Stalin

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
James A. Baldwin

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
James A. Baldwin

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James A. Baldwin

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Gertrude Stein

But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It's like anything else. It's a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.
Ron White

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.
Andy Rooney

A writer's job is to tell the truth.
Andy Rooney

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
Stephen Fry

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
William Butler Yeats

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.
Thomas Malthus

I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.
Thomas Malthus

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Flannery O'Connor

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
Flannery O'Connor

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Flannery O'Connor