The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof [$h¡t] detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
François-René de Chateaubriand,
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Edna Ferber
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury
Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette, Casual Chance, 1964
[A] great writer creates his precursors.
Jorge Luis Borges
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
James Norman Hall
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 one book.
Samuel Johnson
If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always.
Henry Rollins