à Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
~ James A. Michener

A book should be luminous not voluminous.
~ Christian Nevell Bovee

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
~ Cyril Connolly

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
~ Henry Miller

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
~ Hans Magnus Enzensberger

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
~ Henry David Thoreau

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
~ Richard Bach

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
~ Ernest Hemingway

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
~ Virginia Woolf

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
~ Gaston Bachelard

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
~ John K. Hutchens

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.
~ Gregory Nunn

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
~ Count Leo Tolstoy

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

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
~ Maurice Blanchot

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
~ George Gribbon

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
~ Leo Rosten

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
~ Henry Miller

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
~ Nancy Banks Smith