“Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”
“Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.”
“Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.”
“Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.”
“The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.”
“The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.”
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.”
“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”
“For a creative writer possession of the ''truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity.”
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
“Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.”
“The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.”
“Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.”
“The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!”
“Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.”
“You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.”
“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.”
“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
“A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.”
“I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”
“I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.”
“The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”
“An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.”
“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.”
“To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”