All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Nothing is impossible to gods and authors.

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.

“I think that I had better go, Holmes."

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland”

“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”

“Theatre is the most democratic side of literature.”

Live simply so that others may simply live.

"In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti."

"Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable."

"Drama - what literature does at night."

"All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else."

"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."

"When your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it’s always hard to sleep."

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

"New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up"

"[Writers] should tend to lift people up, not lower them down."

"As everyone knows, there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying"

"She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writers. Charlotte was both."

"(Not every doctor can look into a mouse's ear without laughing)"

"I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema, there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles."