All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
It's considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leavÂing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
I've writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
If you think you can then you can.
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I coudn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
“ ‘As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing,’ I will be a writer.’â€ÂÂ
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