Write something even if it's just a suicide note.
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
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.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
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.
Every writer without exception is a masochist a sadist a peeping Tom an exhibitionist a narcissist an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months but you don't earn the...
John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.
Every word she writes is a lie including and and the.
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.
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
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.
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
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