The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.