“The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.”
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”
“Every writer ''creates'' his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ''Ode on a Grecian Urn'' is worth any number of old ladies.”
“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
“Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.”
“I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.”
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”
“Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.”
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
“There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.”
“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
“When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.”
“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.”
“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
“The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.”
“On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.”
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.”
“Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.”
“Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.”
“I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.”
“Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.”
“I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.”
“To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.”
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”