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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.

You write because you want to be read.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think of what to do with the long winter evenings.

Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective.

H EMINGWAY GAVE a great piece of advice about writing, which I follow. He said always finish when you’re in a little bit of a flow, for the next bout.

H EMINGWAY GAVE a great piece of advice about writing, which I follow. He said always finish when you’re in a little bit of a flow, for the next bout.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder—it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.

Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

The best technique is none at all.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas.

Every novelist ought to invent his own technique.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Write with a smile, even when it’s horrible or tragic.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir , a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and coquettes. Handel had power.

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir , a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and coquettes. Handel had power.

I am well aware that an addiction to silk underwear does not necessarily imply that one’s feet are dirty. Nonetheless, style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema.

The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not intended to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be “Look at me!” “Look, no hands!” It’s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you’re writing.