Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits.
Nora Roberts

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Augusten Burroughs

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
Augusten Burroughs

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Augusten Burroughs

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra Pound

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 do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
Lynn Abbey

I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.
Lynn Abbey

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Lynn Abbey

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Salman Rushdie

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Samuel Johnson

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.
Tom Brokaw

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

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

I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn't want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer.
Stevie Nicks

Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.
Stevie Nicks