“Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.”
“The writer does the most good who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.”
“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.”
“The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.”
“Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.”
“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.”
“Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.”
“My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.”
“They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”
“A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.”
“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
“Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.”
“The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.”
“You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.”
“If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.”
“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”
“Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.”
“When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.”
“I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.”
“What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.”
“The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.”
“Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.”
“The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.”
“One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.”
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”