You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

You can stroke people with words.