“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Context: Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography. What should be emphasized? Just what is of general interest? It is advisable, above all, to write honestly and dispense with any of the conventional introductory protestations of modesty. For if one is called upon to tell about one's life so as to make the events that made it what it became useful to the general public, it can mean only that one must have already wrought something positive in life, accomplished a task that people recognize. Accordingly it is a matter of forgetting that one is writing about oneself, of making an effort to abjure one's ego so as to give an account, as objectively as possible, of one's life in the making and of one's accomplishments.

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

Turner v. Collins (1871), L. R. 7 Ch. Ap. Ca. 340.

Preface to Lehrreicher Geschicht-Herold
Other Quotes

Letter to Shirley Wiley (30 March 1954), in The Letters of E. B. White (1989), p. 391

On the theme that she most explores in “Art Talk with Playwright Katori Hall” https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2015/art-talk-playwright-katori-hall (National Endowment of the Arts; 2015 May 28)

The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.