Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
If you would be a reader read if a writer write.
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anyt...
A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
You have to throw yourself away when you write.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.
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.
The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises...
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
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