You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say but what we are unable to say.

Don't ever tell a story like it wasn't about you.

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.