The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.
Roald Dahl

I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer.
Leon Uris

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
Stephen Sondheim

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Stephen Sondheim

The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis.
Talcott Parsons

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
W. Somerset Maugham

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
W. Somerset Maugham

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. Somerset Maugham

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
Shelby Foote

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
Shelby Foote

The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Joan Didion

This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped.
Thom Yorke

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
W. H. Auden

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
James A. Michener

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener