What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good an...
That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours....
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.
Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
Write until your idea becomes reality.
The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
Whatever good and beautiful experience you are having, if you are not writing them down, you are wasting them! Your thoughts on the paper are your real reality because the realities of the experience...
Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely...
I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewrite...
All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.
Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.
When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.
My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.