Writers are the engineers of human souls.
Joseph Stalin
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths, and the lesser ones, who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
Kate DiCamillo
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence.
Edward Bond
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite
Edward Albee
All good song-writers have no more than half a dozen good tunes in their systems, and if they have that many, they are liberally blessed.
Irving Berlin
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
Samuel Johnson
In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is
Geoffrey Cottrell
Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
Mary Wortley Montagu
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
Ralph Bakshi