"

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close...more

"

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

"

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

"

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings,...more

"

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what poi...more

"

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

"

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

"

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

"

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries...more

"

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its p...more

"

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little,...more