“All writers are insane!”

“There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.”

Richard Scarry (1919–1994) author and illustrator from the United States

“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

“That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

“What in the hell—I mean, in heaven—had I just done? This was crazyloco! I’d just made a deal with God to become as great a writer as Homer or better, and I didn’t even know how to read. This was totally, absolutely insane!”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

“It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

“A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

“All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist