A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat. (Quote by - Hugh MacLennan)

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. (Quote by - Saul Bellow)

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach. (Quote by - Samuel Johnson)

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic. (Quote by - Northrop Frye)

The truth is, we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience. (Quote by - Saul Bellow)

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man. (Quote by - E. B. White)

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way. (Quote by - Henry Herbert)

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author. (Quote by - Maxwell Perkins)

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it. (Quote by - W. H. Auden)

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write. (Quote by - A. E. Housman)

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. (Quote by - Cyril Connolly)

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. (Quote by - Epictetus)

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. (Quote by - Norman Mailer)

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. (Quote by - William Wordsworth)

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen. (Quote by - Henry Vaughan)

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes. (Quote by - J. M. Barker)

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. (Quote by - Gertrude Stein)

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. (Quote by - George Orwell)

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves. (Quote by - Lewis Carroll)

I suppose some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat, Like an unsuccessful literary man. (Quote by - Hilaire Belloc)

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself (Quote by - it is the occurring which is difficult. (Quote by - Stephen Leacock)

The waste basket is a writer's best friend. (Quote by - Isaac Bashevis Singer)

Writers are the engineers of human souls. (Quote by - Joseph Stalin)

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate. (Quote by - John Ciardi)