"If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

If you wish to be a writer, write.

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

But this one was a writer, not a reader.

You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories.