A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship.