“A writer fails, not when a reader is not moved; but when, as a reader, the writer is not moved.”
“Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.”
“Before publishers blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.”
“I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial, said Anne, rather scornfully. Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.”
“Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There s a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.”
“The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody s best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.”
“Strong people write bad stories.”
“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does”
“I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.”
“To say that a writer s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer s build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.”
“The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.”
“Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
“Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.”
“If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer s life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?”
“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.”
“Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.”
“Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.”