There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.
These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so...
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...
Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could...
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
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...
I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.
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.
My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he sho...
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.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It...