“The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”
“An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.”
“To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”
“Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.”
“The writer does the most good who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.”
“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.”
“The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.”
“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.”
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.”
“They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”
“A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.”
“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
“Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.”
“The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.”
“If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.”
“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”
“Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.”
“When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.”
“I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.”
“What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.”
“The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.”
“Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.”
“One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.”
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.”
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”