“(The storyteller) is the man who would let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”

from The Storyteller, an essay by Walter Benjamin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin

“We don’t sell books,” a publisher said, “we sell solutions to marketing problems.”

Quote from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating With The Dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiating_with_the_Dead

Write as though you are writing to a dear and close friend. Write privately, not publicly, without fear or timidity, so that your true friend will read it over and over and then want more enchanting letters from you.

Muriel Spark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Spark

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic clothes.

Quentin Crisp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Crisp

All books are either dreams or swords. You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Amy Lowell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Lowell

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand – a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods – or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardised values.

Willa Cather

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willa_Cather

You don’t write about people you know, you write what you know about people.

Jan Mark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Mark

I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps.

Doris Lessing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing

In utter loneliness, a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.

John Steinbeck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man’s personality. For him alone everything is vacant.

Baudelaire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire