The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Jorge Luis Borges

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
Jorge Luis Borges

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
Isaac Asimov

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
David Foster Wallace

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
David Foster Wallace

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
Erica Jong

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.
James Thurber

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
Beverly Cleary

I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Fulton J. Sheen

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
Raymond Chandler

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.
Leon Uris

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Stephen Sondheim