Emotions and Feelings

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts, you can also get by, after a fashion again, without talent. But you certainly can’t get by without either .

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

I am convinced as a member of the reading public that bad [author] photographs are bad business. I have been put off reading books, which otherwise looked rather attractive, by the puss of the author printed on the back of the dust cover.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The terror of the white page in the typewriter.

A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.

I don’t preach patience to you, but cynicism; it is the most comforting of philosophies. You will get over your present difficulties only to run into something worse, and so on until the last sad scene. Make up your mind to it—and then make the best of it. That is, do the best you can within the limits of your chance. If you can’t write a book a year, then write one every two years .

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

It’s a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic.… Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

The best thing you can do about critics is never say a word. In the end you have the last say, and they know it.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously .

Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude—and now and then a piece of red meat.

He who eats with most pleasure is he who least requires sauce.

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.