"Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life."
Gregory McDonald
 
"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all."
James Baldwin 
 

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."
Max Eastman
 
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
Albert Einstein
 

"I don't think it's very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting."
Paul Schrader
 
"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
George Bernard Shaw
 
"The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost."
William Carlos Williams

"The business of art is this--to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
Leo Tolstoy
 
"Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women."
Sigmund Freud
 
"It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair."
Maureen Howard

"Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum."
Tom Stoppard

"The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind."
Henry James
 
"The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession."
George Sand

"When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer."
Isaac Bashevis Singer
 
"Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination."
Sol Saks

"If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us."
William Faulkner
 
"Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors."
Pablo Picasso

"Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing."
Guy De Maupassant
 
"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."
Isaac Asimov

"The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash."
Nathaniel Hawthorn
 
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo