Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

- Josh Billings

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

- Quentin Crisp

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

- Groucho Marx

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

- Fran Lebowitz

Revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

- Stephen King

Never let a bad memory get in the way of a good memoir.

- Joanie Levenson

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers.  My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.  There’s many a best -seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

- Flannery O’Connor

It’s splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

- Gustave Flaubert

Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.

- Paulo Coelho

All literature is gossip.

- Truman Capote

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

- Dr. Samuel Johnson,

I can write better than anybody who can write faster,  and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

- A. J. Liebling

There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.

- William Zinsser

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

- Robert Benchley

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar,  but now that I am a grown up they call me a writer.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer