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.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial...
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Mid...
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttl...
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
They're fancy talkers about themselves writers. If I had to give young writers advice I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.
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.
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
A person that doesn't read and doesn't have any ethics complaining about a writer feels like a Chihuahua barking at a Rottweiler.
For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost tho...