„Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who was the first Arabic writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature and who was often considered the greatest writer in the Arab world… lived his entire life in Cairo, which provided the inspiration and backdrop for almost all of his writing… He set most of his works in the ancient Islamic quarter of Cairo, with its mosques and serpentine alleys teeming with shopkeepers, metalsmiths, government workers, peasants, prostitutes and thieves. His vibrant novels portraying life at every level of society were often likened to those of such other writers of urban social realism as Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola.“

„Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.“

—  Isaac Asimov American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction and popular … 1920 - 1992

Источник: I. Asimov

„All the ousted regimes, as well as the oppressive regimes that have hung on during the Arab Spring, have now blessed Egypt's coup…a blossoming democracy in Cairo can easily spread throughout the Arab world…Those who support freedom and democracy in the Middle East, however, should resist the new tyranny in Cairo with all their might.“

—  Tawakkol Karman Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient 1979

2010s, Morsy is the Arab World's Mandela (2013)

„Plainly Hugo was the greatest man of letters of his day. It has been given to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, so rich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so that the record of his career embraces a period of more than sixty years. There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did not prove his right. From first to last; from the time of Chateaubriand to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure from the scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the past like Alexander's empire.“

—  William Ernest Henley English poet, critic and editor 1849 - 1903

"Hugo"
Views and Reviews (1889)

„In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.“

—  J.M. Coetzee South African writer 1940

Dagens Nyheter http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

„The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.“

—  John Updike American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic 1932 - 2009

Writers on Themselves (1986)

„He had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life.“

—  Harlan Ellison American writer 1934 - 2018

About Isaac Asimov – quoted in Page Fright : Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers (2009) by Harry Bruce
Jerry Pournelle, in "Chaos Manor: Is there an Upgrade in your future?" in Dr. Dobb's Journal : Software Tools For The Professional Programmer (2005), Vol. 30, Issues 374-379, p. 9
Вариант: Most writers hate to write, and will grasp any excuse to do something else … There are exceptions. Isaac Asimov actually was never happier than sitting at a keyboard — first, his old typewriter; then, the TRS-80; and later, a more conventional PC. But then, Isaac was unusual, and his experience with writer's block was the worst 10 minutes of his life.

„It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?“

—  Jeff VanderMeer, книга City of Saints and Madmen

"The Strange Case of X", p. 196
City of Saints and Madmen (2001–2004)

„I'm really serious about this writing thing. What time I haven't been writing, I've been reading: Thomas Wolfe, if you know who he is. His writing is mostly built about the central character of a writer, himself. Altho it's fiction, it deals with his life and experiences. In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, Shakespeare included. He is a genius.“

—  James Jones American author 1921 - 1977

Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
To Reach Eternity (1989)

„A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit — no matter how often he's reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley…“

—  Hunter S. Thompson American journalist and author 1937 - 2005

1960s, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966)
Контексте: A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit — no matter how often he's reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley... Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise. Most are simply toads... and they are going to stay that way... Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

„Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.“

—  Edna Ferber Novelist, playwright 1885 - 1968

„The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.“

—  Henry Miller American novelist 1891 - 1980

„I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.“

—  Kenzaburō Ōe Japanese author 1935

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

„… In a way, the author is a writer's public persona. The writer, however, is a private person. Anyone who expresses life's experiences--their own or someone else's--in writing is a creative writer, and for him or her, the most important concern, the passion, is the writing itself…“

—  Lucha Corpi 1945

On how she defines “author” in “Interview with Mystery Author Lucha Corpi” http://latinola.com/story.php?story=8074 in ¡Latino LA! (2009 Dec 4)

„I think he writes the truth. Because life is like that most of the time in some shape or form, whether it’s illness or the end of the world. Cormac’s a writer’s writer. You read his writing and think, I can do that, and then you sit down and try. And you try, dude.“

—  Ridley Scott English film director and film producer 1937

On the relentlessly brutal tone of the works of screenwriter Cormac McCarthy
New York Times interview (2013)

„Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.“

—  Alberto Moravia Italian writer and journalist 1907 - 1990

„Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.“

—  Martin Amis Welsh novelist 1949

The Observer [London] (30 August 1987)

„The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.“

—  Pearl S. Buck American writer 1892 - 1973

The Chinese Novel (1938)

„He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny.“

—  Howard Thurman, книга Jesus and the Disinherited

Источник: Jesus and the Disinherited

„Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.“

—  Raymond Carver American short story author and poet 1938 - 1988