No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

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.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

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 isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

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.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

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.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

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.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

… Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

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

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

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

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

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.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

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.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Writing is thinking on paper.