Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Voltaire

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.
Robert A. Heinlein

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
John Steinbeck

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
Robert Frost

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein

Writers speak stench.
Franz Kafka

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

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
Flannery O'Connor

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
Langston Hughes

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
Mel Brooks

The reason actors, artists, writers have agents is because we'll do it for nothing. That's a basic fact - you gotta do it.
Morgan Freeman