My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.Collection: Attitude
The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.Collection: Romantic
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.
An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
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.
When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.
If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.
I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
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.
I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Memories
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!Collection: Life
I never show anything to anybody until I've finished itCollection: Literature