“Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.”
“Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.”
“He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.”
“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.”
“To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind.”
“Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.”
“Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!”
“I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
“The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.”
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
“Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”
“I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.”
“Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.”
“I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.”
“Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.”
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”
“The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.”
“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”
“Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.”
“A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.”
“What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.”
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
“Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”
“It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.”
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
“Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”