 The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out. |
| In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75. |
| I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it. |
| All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one. |
| No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid. |
| Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody. |
| There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough. |
| In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody. |
| Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. |
| A writer has to live with a sense of honor. |
| In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices. |
| My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me. |
| It's those damn critics again. |
| At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded. |
| Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American. |
| Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own. |
| I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young. |
| In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that. |
| You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish. |
| Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form. |
