If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
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.
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
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.
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