Emotions and Feelings

There’s a way to do it better—find it.

Faultless to a fault.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Keep your bones in good motion, kid, and quietly consume and digest what is necessary. I think it is not so much important to build a literary thing as it is not to hurt things. I think it is important to be quiet and in love with park benches; solve whole areas of pain by walking across a rug .

Be regular and orderly like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

When I hear about writer’s block, this one and that one! Fuck off! Stop writing, for Christ’s sake: You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.

My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It’s an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial “abuse excuse.” Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something . And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

Don’t work too hard. Fool around a bit. Be lazy. Don’t worry, Life is —forever.

There comes a moment in the day, when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes the hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.

Sometimes you can lick an especially hard problem by facing it always the very first thing in the morning with the very freshest part of your mind. This has so often worked with me that I have an uncanny faith in it.

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.

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

A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.

Resist much, obey little.

For the love of God don’t condescend! Don’t assume the attitude of saying, “See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!”

An author who assures you that he writes for himself alone and that he does not care whether he is heard or not is a boaster and is deceiving either himself or you.

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.