Those huge novels from North America are not the product of diligence; hard labour would refine and clarify them.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

I want to pay tribute to my four writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed."