Quotes on Writing

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

A word after a word after a word is power.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Ability is nothing without opportunity.