You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party
It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.
It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Art manifests itself in paradoxical ways. At times it creates and at times it gets created!
There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.
...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only...
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my...
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.
If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surf...
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about...
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...
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.