The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet f...
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publish...
In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine...
I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.
You have to throw yourself away when you write.
My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything...
When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
I quote others in order to better express my own self.
That's not writing that's typing.
The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
Thought flies and words go on foot.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.