“Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.”

“You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.”

“The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.”

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”

“I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.”

“Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.”