Writers are noted for having strange, unique, and sometimes twisted perspectives on the world; through the lens of writing, many writers claim that they learn to view the world in a different way. I’m not sure why exactly; maybe it’s because we writers are more insulated from the rest of the world at large, or maybe it’s something else entirely. Regardless of why writers are different, it’s always interesting to read what they’ve written and said about the art of writing. 

Here are some more of my favorite quotations from the ongoing Writer’s Remorse series, Writers on Writing. A few of the included quotes could be more accurately titled Writers on Reading, but the gist is the same. Please feel free to add more of your favorite quotes in the comment section. 

1. I don’t like traveling if I know I have to write about it. --David Sedaris
2. I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and by which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction. --Michel de Montaigne
3. No one has ever felt passionately about a lead pencil. But there are moments when it can become supremely desirable to obtain one; moments when we are set on having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. --Virginia Woolf
4. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is considered the most praiseworthy method. --Walter Benjamin
5. To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is to write books if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? To publish one’s taints in order to amuse and or exasperate? A barbarism with respect to our intimacy, a profanation, a defilement. And a temptation. --E. M. Cioran
6. I was far from imagining, when I sat down to write this memoir, that it would prove to be such a difficult and arduous task. --James Baldwin
7. Capote would keep us [Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams] entranced with mischievous stories about the great. Apparently the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to fall out of their unsuspecting closets. --Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
8. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. --Henry David Thoreau