
Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

It is legal because I wish it.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereign.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

Most of the stuff I've read about me has been true.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

I've always spent more time with a smile on my face than not, but the thing is, I don't write about it.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

She can't even chew gum and walk in a straight line, let alone write a book.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the trick

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever after wards.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.