- 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."
- John Gardner
- "Nothing is harder than being a true novelist, unless that is all one wants to be, in which case, though becoming a true novelist is hard, everything else is harder."
- George Saunders
- "The Writer, said Donald Barthelme, is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut conscious mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious."
- 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."
- George Saunders
- "Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of a life as it is actually lived. That yelp, which is not a logical sound, does good for all of us. Chekhov said that the purpose of art is not to solve problems but to formulate them correctly...."