The task of the writer is to deepen the mystery rather than to resolve it.

--Flannery O’Connor

Who can regard himself as the originator of lines which move readers no less than he was himself moved to write them?

--Robert Graves

The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

--Anthony Trollope

A writer’s style, Yeats believed, is the equivalent of self-conquest, and he always envisaged his art as the reward of labor.

--Seamus Heaney

I read for the pleasure of learning how to write.

--V. S. Pritchett

No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

--Paul Auster

We do not read to make ourselves cultured, but to nourish our souls. Real culture is the evidence, not the reality, of the fully realized spirit.

--Robertson Davies

Prose is not to be read aloud to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both many have known. It should appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of stone.

--Henry Green

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

--William Stafford

. . . reading is not a substitute for life, because it is indivisible from life. Indeed, it is a reflection of the spirit of the reader, and I am truly convinced that we who are committed readers may appear to choose our books, but in an equally true sense our books choose us. By an agency that is not coincidence, but something much more powerful that Jungians call synchronicity, we find, and are found by, the books we need to enlarge and complete us. Reading is not escape, something done at random; it is directed unerringly toward the inner target. It is truly a turning inward. It is exploration, extension, and reflection of one’s innermost self. If I have been a rake at reading, the caprice has been to the outward eye alone. The inward spirit, I am convinced, knew very well what it was doing.

--Robertson Davies

Writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward.

--Marguerite Duras

You’re a writer if you write. You’re a writer if you decide to dedicate yourself to saying what you are moved to say and to putting it in the best form you can for people other than yourself.

--A. L. Kennedy

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

--William Gass

Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.

--Kingsley Amis

To know how to write well is to know how to think well.

--Blaise Pascal

Most of the losses we face are on paper, a loss of words. On the plus side, words are still something that we can share with each other. One-on-one, they still serve the purpose for which they were created: to make it possible for us to be human. On the other hand, they also make possible our escape from that responsibility.

--Wright Morris

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

--Stephen King

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

--Thomas Mann

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer knows when he finally gets there. On one level the truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and the poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

--Don DeLillo

Writers—who use words—often start with wordlessness.

--Graham Swift

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.

--James Joyce

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