Perhaps loving something is the only starting place there is for making your life your own.
Alice Koller
Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer.
Bonnie Friedman
I’ve never thought of fiction in terms of escape, but as a way of sort of enlarging my own experience.
Carol Shields
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous and constant.
Edna Ferber
You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all that you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.
Florida Scott Maxwell
Self-admiration giveth much consolation.
Gertrude Atherton
I felt that my roots had been recovered and that during that patient exercise of daily writing I had also recovered my own soul.
Isabel Allende
I write only for fame and without any view of pecuniary emolument.
Jane Austen
All writers are made up of layers and layers of other writers and then hopefully themselves, their own voice.
Jeanette Winterson
A lot of people write better than they are.
Joan Barfoot
You have something … without which no writer can ever be great and maybe not even good, and that quality is love and compassion.
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Adele Wiseman, 10 July 1956
The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything.
Maria Lenhart
The season is changeable, fitful, and maddening as I am myself these days that are cloaked with too many demands and engagements.
May Sarton
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures an cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson Davies
The writer’s intelligence affords no advantage in solving his or her own life. Indeed, one wonders if the chaos of one is sometimes needed to sustain the other.
Rosemary Sullivan
I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you’re going to write them convincingly.
Ruth Ozeki
The only books you can burn are your own. And you have to know why. It is really not so that no one else can read them. It is so they will be gone from who you are. I mean, who you are as a writer.
Timothy Findley
Not that you’ve put yourself there consciously. But your energy is there. Something of your own character – something of your own make-up goes into the character and make-up of everyone you write. And the rest of you is private. Mostly.
Timothy Findley
Books are the mediators between our desire and our despair.
Timothy Findley
Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can’t limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don’t know everything you know.
Walter Murch