“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
“Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.”
“I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.”
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”
“Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.”
“There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.”
“The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.”
“On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.”
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.”
“Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.”
“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.”
“Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.”
“I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.”
“To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.”
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
“Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.”
“I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.”
“The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”
“I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.”
“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”
“An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.”
“You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.”
“I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.”
“I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, ''I will tell you a story,'' and then he passes the hat.”
“Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.”