The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
Samuel Johnson
Few things are more tempting to a writer than to repeat, admiringly, what he has said before
John Kenneth Galbraith
A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities.
Dylan Thomas
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Sidonie Gabrielle
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
Brian Moore
When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it. He must always be a stranger to the place he loves, and its people.
William Morris
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
Fannie Hurst
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
Karl Marx
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
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Leo Rosten
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
Elia Kaza