The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.