“I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.”

“I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) English-American childrens' playwright and author

“If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.”

Anne Tyler (1941) American novelist

“I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

“I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

“I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

“I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

“Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. […] I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

“I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP