Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?