I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

I could not think without writing.

Quienes no escriben no saben lo bonito que es escribir. Antes siempre me lamentaba por no saber dibujar...

I don’t think I’ll ever become a real writer and that’s quite all right now. I’ve reached an age at which I’m more at peace with my limitations and failures.

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

Unfortunately, an equally strong negative current — fear — is at work. Fear of writing gets planted in most Americans at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away. The blank piece of paper or the blank computer screen, waiting to be filled with our wonderful words, can freeze us into not writing any words at all, or writing words that are less than wonderful.

Figurábanse que yo podía escribir por oficio, como los demás literatos, cuando jamás he sabido escribir sino movido por la pasión,

I am but little disposed to put things in writing. One almost always regrets doing so.

I have spent a good many years since — too many, I think — being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

I was a wannabe who was actually unable to write because I had nothing to say, who wasn’t honest enough with himself to draw the appropriate conclusions and was therefore trying to get a foot in the world of literature at any cost. Not as someone who created something himself, someone who wrote and was published, but as a parasite, as someone who wrote as others wrote, a second-rater.

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write,

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.