A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.
A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write of some particular day, he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt, and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it, they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense, but that ability is at the bottom of writing, I am sure.
I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.
You have to throw yourself away when you write.
A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you, there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
The editorial job has become, unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read, a job of making judgements on outlines, ideas, reputations, previous books, scenarios, treatments, talk and promises.
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
How can you write if you can't cry?
