The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.
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.
Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temp...
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.
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.
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.
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 non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
All writers are insane!
Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not ha...
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore,...
I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle...
In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine...
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