There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

An essayist is a lucky person who has found a way to discourse without being interrupted.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he'd ever come to sublimity, and that hadn't happened in four years.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.