You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
My father once admonished me to master the laws that govern fine writing until I could weave my words into worlds. If ever I accomplish that feat, I will sign my name to the tale.
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered...
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from...
As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of ba...
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.
Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have l...
Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.