Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man…

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a…

— Julianna Baggott

We expect a great man to be a good reader.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

— Jerry Pournelle

“Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you…

— Joanna Rakoff

“Today I resolve to take writing seriously, to keep going and never stop, to learn everything I can and make it as a writer.”

— James Scott Bell

I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn't good enough, or that it…

— Jay McInerney

“You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you'll not make anything else. You may make up your mind of that.”

— C.S. Lewis

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the…

— Paul Theroux

I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them…

— Lin-Manuel Miranda

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling,…

— Santha Rama Rau

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for…

— Harlan Coben

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.

— Fred Saberhagen