“If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.”

“Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.”

Walter Moers book The City of Dreaming Books

“i believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“You are writing for yourself.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

“If you stare into a flame
You'll get an eye full of energy
If you write your nightscapades
You'll get a dawn full of promises”

Happy Rhodes (1965) American singer-songwriter