A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

(A Moveable Feast)

What a writer should try to do is to make something which will be so written that it will become a part of the experience of those who read him.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as the other.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it ( Read more... )

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single ( Read more... )

"...Sometimes when I was starting a new story and could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will ( Read more... )

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

(In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald)

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.