I met a couple of kids over the weekend who hope to grow up and become writers. That’s always inspiring to hear but I also wonder if they really understand the struggles and hardships that await. So for them and anyone else who writes or wants to write or loves writing, here are a few of the quotes I’ve collected over the years on this “noblest of professions.”

…I had decided that the only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
– Russell Baker

When you start writing you’re 98% pure writer and 2% critic. After you’ve written for a length of time, you’ve learned a great deal about your craft, and you’ve become 2% pure writer and 98% critic. It’s like writing uphill.
– David Westheimer

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
– Paul Rudnick

Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
– Robert Bresson

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
– Gene Fowler

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type ‘Act one, scene one,’ your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill or anyone. It’s that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
– Meredith Willson

There was a time when making ‘Barney Miller’ a hit on the air was my life. I cared about nothing else. That was all I was concerned with. And I told my wife and I told my children if it costs me my relationship with my family, I’m committing five years of my life to making the best television show I can possibly make. Whatever it costs, under any circumstance. And I hocked my house, and I gave up my salary and I did everything to give the show a chance to start going. And that’s what you have to do.
– Danny Arnold

Hollywood is the only town where you cannot fail. You can only quit trying.
– Dennis Foley

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.
– Herman Mankiewicz telling fellow journalist Ben Hecht about Hollywood

My chief memory of movieland is of asking in the producer’s office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalysts couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.
– Ben Hecht

Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit.
– Alan Zweibel from “Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner: A Sort of Love Story.”

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.
– Rod Serling

To me, that’s disaster. Who’s the authority in that case? I’ve seen that, and I think it’s utterly unendurable, and usually the actor’s wrong. Generally speaking, actors are not writers. I try not to change the script because I think you get into a funny area there. If you start opposing the writer, you lose any sense of discipline, and half the time you’re opposed because you aren’t actually prepared to face the problem. You can fool yourself so easily that way. I mean, if you’ve taken the part because the writing is good, then it’s your business to find a way to play it, not change it because it suits your whim. To me, there’s nothing to take the place of good dramatic writing. Nothing.
– John Hurt, replying to the question ”How do you feel about American stars’ power to change the script?”

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
– Thomas Mann

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
– Norman Mailer

Writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand.
– George Orwell

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
– Karl Kraus

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
– Somerset Maugham

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
– Anne Rice

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
– Gustave Flaubert

We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
– Henry James

You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that’s it.
– Rita Mae Brown

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer.
– Harlan Ellison

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
– Arthur Miller

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
– Chinese proverb

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
– Benjamin Franklin

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.
– William Sansom

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money.
– S.J. Perelman

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

Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
– Oscar Wilde

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
– Sinclair Lewis

A writer is always admired most, not by those who have read him, but by those who have merely heard of him.
– H.L. Mencken

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
– Quentin Crisp

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
– William Gass

Writers are only rarely likable.
– Joan Didion

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
– Anais Nin

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.
– Jules Renard

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
– Jules Renard

Fifty years old and still only a writer!
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think that the fact that I’ve been pretty successful and don’t have too many really terrible shows, and have a reasonable amount of good ones around is that I’ve always thought that I was as good as the material and no better. And I once wrote for Peter Sellers and I saw how that poor man was preyed upon by film producers who’d say ”Ah, don’t worry about the script, Peter. You’re so funny, you’d be funny without the script.” The moment that you start believing that you can be funny in a situation that isn’t any good…
– John Cleese

The first draft of everything is shit.
– Ernest Hemingway

Getting even is one reason for writing.
– William Gass

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
– Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf (1927)

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.
– Moliere, The Ridiculous Precieuses (1659) tr. Donald M. Frame

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
– Mark Twain

I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that is too adorable, I’d rather have the money.
– Dorothy Parker

The first thing writing must do is save your life.
– Charles Bukowski

You’re always going to meet some guy who practiced a little harder than you, and when you meet him he’s going to beat you. If you’re not spending all your time looking at videos on laserdisc, studying movies and writing them and working, there are going to be people better than you, and they’re going to burn you when you get there.
– Steven Soderbergh

They switch directors because something is very wrong. They switch writers because it’s Tuesday.
– Joss Whedon on Hollywood’s treatment of writers

When a movie is failing or a play is failing, cut out the wisdom.
-Paddy Chayefsky

If what you’re writing isn’t likely to offend or annoy anyone at all, go back and start again.
-Larry Gelbart

It all starts with the writer, and to my way of thinking, it basically ends with the writer. If you get a good boffo story that’s well written, that’s irreplaceable. There ain’t an actor born who couldn’t be replaced. Directors, scenic designers, all of that can be replaced. Writing is the bottom line. Why are writers treated with such disrespect? I do not know.
-William H. Macy