He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an inte...
The realization that a decline in the moral state impedes the flowering of literature is a feeling unique to the Jewish people. Only we realize in truth that in order to improve the quality of literat...
It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once,...
Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide...
...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only...
If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense tha...
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from...
Bir kitabı okuyup bitirdiğiniz zaman, bunu yazan keşke çok yakın bir arkadaşım olaydı da, canım her istediğinde onu telefonla arayıp konuşabilseydim diyorsanız, o kitap bence gerçekten iyidir.
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
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.
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?
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
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.
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the...
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.