- Plato
- "Don't ask the poet to explain himself. He cannot."
- Carl Jung
- "The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him."
- Somerset Maugham
- "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
- Graham Greene
- "All good novelists have bad memories."
- WB Kinsella
- "Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down."
- May Swenson
- "It's not for me – religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet."
- Russell Baker
- "The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
- Elizabeth Bishop
- "Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs – no regular hours, so many temptations!"
- Gore Vidal
- "I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."
- John Updike
- "The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions."
- Mark Twain
- "Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use."