The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task. (Quote by - Robertson Davies)

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity. (Quote by - Quintilian)

That's not writing, that's typing. (Quote by - Truman Capote)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. (Quote by - Francois Rene De Chateaubriand)

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. (Quote by - Samuel Johnson)

No tears and the writer, no tears and the reader. (Quote by - Robert Frost)

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further. (Quote by - Malcolm Lowry)

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons, he would lose his angels. (Quote by - Dakin Williams)

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. (Quote by - Daphne du Maurier)

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good. (Quote by - Samuel Johnson)

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform. (Quote by - Roland Barthes)

My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions. (Quote by - Joyce Carey)

Self-expression is for babies and seals, where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader. (Quote by - Vincent McHugh)

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart. (Quote by - J. B. Priestley)

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to get sensible men to read it. (Quote by - C. C. Colton)

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself, and quite advisedly and deliberately, a certain margin of misstatement. (Quote by - Benjamin N. Cardozo)

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. (Quote by - Toni Morrison)

It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in. (Quote by - John Mason Brown)

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him. (Quote by - Jean-Paul Sartre)

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. (Quote by - Joan Didion)

Footnotes, the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text. (Quote by - William James)

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus, teaching at least part-time at university level, mingling too much for his work's good with academics, doing as much writing as he can for the CBC, and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship. (Quote by - George Woodcock)

Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it. (Quote by - Maxwell Perkins)