I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.
Jackie Kennedy

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Mel Brooks

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
John Steinbeck

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
John Steinbeck

If you wish to be a writer, write.
Epictetus

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 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

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

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

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner

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

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
Jimmy Buffett

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
Jimmy Buffett