The most important things are the hardest things to say. Stephen King
I write to discover what I know. Flannery O’Connor
The joy that isn’t shared dies young. Anne Sexton
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart. Susan Sontag
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything… It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus. Enid Bagnold
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable — we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job. Jeanette Winterson
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. Joseph Conrad
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. Philip Roth
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. Isaac Asimov
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Rainer Maria Rilke
One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise. Italo Calvino
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
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world… enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space. Abraham Lincoln
Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. Logan Persall Smith
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. George Orwell
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endue it. Samuel Johnson
Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood. William Howard Taft
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. Anaïs Nin
