If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.

To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

It does not matter how 'courageous' a writer may be. Courage becomes useless, for a courageous writer who is not published is not a writer at all.

A real writer [...] doesn't look up to any other writer but himself.

If there’s a fear of confronting who you are and what you believe, you're never going to be a good writer because you need to be able to see through the eyes of people who are not the same as you.

A Quotation without a reference is like a geological specimen of unknown locality.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

One thing that separates would-be writers from working writers is that the latter know their work will never match their dreams.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration.