1. A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others. ~Leo Rosten
2. Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. ~Mark Twain
3. But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. ~Lord Byron
4. Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed. ~Leo Rosten
5. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart... ~William Wordsworth
6. In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed. Leo Rosten
7. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. ~Ernest Hemingway
8. The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. ~Elizabeth Drew