Others

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I REMEMBER [John] Gardner telling me, “Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.”

You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose.

“N EVER READ a book, Johnnie, and you will be a rich man.”

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

A sentence may be as long as the writer pleases, provided that he confines it to a single connected range of ideas, and by careful punctuation prevents the reader from finding it either tedious or confusing.

The author makes his readers, just as he makes his characters.

The man who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

There should be two main objects in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message, and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading—he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader … by either the author or the people in the tale. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate.

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!”

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

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.

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 .

A writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

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

Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.

A man of letters may have a mistress who makes books, but he must have a wife who makes shirts.