Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
How can you write if you can't cry?
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.
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.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.
All writers have their own pet commandments.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
She told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they coul...
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other p...
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressin...
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having such a representative life. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where t...
All writers are insane!
Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college...
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