“You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen—editors, agents and publishers—whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high.”

“...I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway. But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, suprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested....But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

“To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.”

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

“There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.”

“A writer ought to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”

“Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.”

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you—as if you haven’t been told a million times already—that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.”

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”

“We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.”

“Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand.”

“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”

“Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.”

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”

“Writers are some of the most important people in America today, doing the most crucial work, bearing a heavy responsibility as the last exemplars of American entrepreneurship and cussedness. It takes brains to write, and you can’t fake it. Anybody who can turn out a good story is probably smarter than half the corporation executives in America and a good deal more honest.”