‘Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.’
– Neil Gaiman
‘God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.’
– W. H. Auden
‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’
– Thomas Mann
‘Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.’
– Cyril Connolly
‘The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is that he’s given the freedom to starve wherever he likes.’
– S. J. Perelman
‘The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.’
– François-René de Chateaubriand
‘I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.’
– Nora Ephron
‘A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.’
– Jorge Luis Borges
‘And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it.’
– Sylvia Plath
‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’
– Henry David Thoreau
Image: Neil Gaiman, signing books after a reading from ‘Anansi Boys’ in Berkeley, 2005 © 2005 Jutta, share-alike licence.