I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.