Writing is one of the most solitary activities in the world.
Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.
Writing does not resurrect. It buries.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Words are like breath, you say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them.
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
To write is human, to edit is divine.
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.
The history of a city was like the history of a family – there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.
