The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
That's not writing that's typing.
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...
Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.
Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
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.
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything...
On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
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.
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...
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...
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our...
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...
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
Showing 1281 to 1300 of 1439 results