“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”
“If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.”
“Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.”
“The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.”
“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.”
“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”
“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
“I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.”
“The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.”
“I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”
“Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.”
“Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.”
“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.”
“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
“Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.”
“I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”
“Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?”
“If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.”
“A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”
“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”
“In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.”
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.”
“I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.”
“I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?”
“Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.”
“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”