In some books I have done more careful planning than in others, but always the end was seen from the beginning, and in each case it was the end that I set out to reach. I mean, literally, the end of the story: not necessarily the scene, but the feeling of the end, the mood […]
Authors Quotes
Read for ideas, not authors.
If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.
An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Wouldn’t it be awful if I came to Australia and looked you up, and everything you may have imagined about me turned out to be completely disappointing. I always say that if you like a man’s books, take care never to meet him.
The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience.
Having just read the admirable profile of Hemingway in the New Yorker, I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far, too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.
An author whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation is commensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not transcend them, shall have the income, say, of a rising young physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city. In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the […]
The best time for planning a book is while you are doing dishes.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it come as sincerely from the author’s soul.
