All good books are alike in that they are truer than if thay had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that that all happened to you. - Ernest Hemingway, Esquire, December 1934
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has no peace until then. Everyhing goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. - William Faulkner, interview, New York 1956
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. William Faulkner, interview, New York 1956
There is no way that a writer can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured... The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure th acute stages in private and where the food can be poked in to him with a stick. - Robert A. Heinlein, 1985
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease. - Peter Abelard, Abelard to Heloise, letter 8
Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up. - Margaret Culkin Banning, The Writer, March 1960
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass. - Eudora Welty
Why don't you write books people can read?
Nora Joyce, to her husband James
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. - Gore Vidal
"If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. - Oscar Wilde