Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves. Helen Garner
Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century. Alan Dean Foster
Writing and singing does give me some kind of release from the demons of my past, it is a therapy of sorts, but to be honest, my marriage played a more important role in the acceptance of myself than performance has ever done. Michelle Shocked
Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own. Terry Brooks
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. Eudora Welty
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood. Jack Prelutsky
Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life. Suzanne Vega
Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better. Jane Rule
