If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them – you can’t help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there’s […]

Don’t explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine everybody drinks water.

Once you put it down, you simply can’t pick it up. (Of a much praised book by Henry James)

I don’t believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don’t want to. That’s something that you just want to take on trust. It’s a classic… something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I do not read anything but history and biography. You perceive that for me to presume to indicate the hundred authors which a person ought to read, would be folly. No, leave me out: My testimony would not be valuable.

And so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d ‘a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a’ tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.