Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil.

Thought flies and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice. I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.

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