All women, as authors, are feeble and tiresome. I wish they were forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster shell.
Authors Quotes
One hates an author that’s all author.
When I read something saying I’ve not done anything as good as “Catch 22” I’m tempted to reply, “Who has?”
In some books I have done more careful planning than in others, but always the end was seen from the beginning, and in each case it was the end that I set out to reach. I mean, literally, the end of the story: not necessarily the scene, but the feeling of the end, the mood […]
Read for ideas, not authors.
If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.
An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Wouldn’t it be awful if I came to Australia and looked you up, and everything you may have imagined about me turned out to be completely disappointing. I always say that if you like a man’s books, take care never to meet him.
The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience.
Having just read the admirable profile of Hemingway in the New Yorker, I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far, too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.
