(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates.
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
