Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

No one can ever write about anything that happened to him after he was twelve years old.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

I learned that all of my manuscripts have been rejected three or four times since I last heard. It is a nice thing to know that so many people are reading my books. That is one way of getting an audience.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.