We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in...
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publish...
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...
He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
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.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
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.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.
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...
Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.
For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in the...
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the developme...
I keep six honest serving-men they taught me all I know their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is...
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.