Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
