It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
Jessamyn West
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
Jules Renards
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.
A. Bronson Alcott
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
Russell Lynes
Authors are magpies, echoing each other’s words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.
Bergen Evans