"I used to greet each morning spitting blood in the washbasin, having the night before gnashed the inside of my mouth while dreaming I had misplaced a comma in my writing of that day, throwing off the pattern of speech given to a character who lived two hundred years ago. Years later a dentist asked
me if I had a history of mental illness, because the mentally ill often exhibit the advanced molar grindings I did."
Erskine Caldwell:
"I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a storyteller."
Cyril Connolly:
"A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out."
Mickey Spillane:
"If you're a singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes."
Edna Ferber:
"The ideal view for daily writing, hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible."
Bernard Baruch:
"Be what you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
E.B. White:
"Be obscure clearly."
Andre Malraux:
"All art is a revolt against man's fate."
William Styron:
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end."
Franz Kafka:
"A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us."
George Bernard Shaw:
"In literature the ambition of a novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."
H. L. Mencken:
"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."
John D. MacDonald:
"My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly."
Anthony Hope Hawkins:
"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."
Ernest Hemingway:
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
E. L. Doctorow:
"A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins."
