Quotes About Author

The cat is the best anarchist.

I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end.

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

He whispered this last so low that it was inaudible to anyone that did not love you.

I understand. That's the trouble. I understand. I'll understand all the time. All day and all night. Especially all night. I'll understand. You don't have to worry about that.

Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

How can there be solidarity of workers with fools like you?

But it is death nevertheless, one of the subjects that a man may write of.

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career. —

And tell me, who is the greatest writer in America? My husband, said my wife.

This is all very dull, I would not state it except that you ask for it.

Show irony and pity.

Stupid people will think it is strange. But we must be proud. I love to be proud. So do I, he said. We'll start being proud now.

While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald

But she has a tongue that scalds and that bites like a bull whip. With this tongue she takes the hide from any one. She is of an unbelievable barbarousness.

Brett was in bed. She had just been brushing her hair and held the brush in her hand. The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants.

he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister. All

am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature

You ought to write a book on wines, count, I said. Mr. Barnes, answered the count, All I want out of wine is to enjoy them.

Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.

My six words of advice to writers are: Read, read, read, write, write, write.

Implicit in Marxism – as the leap from the Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom – there lies the whole so subversive and un-static heritage of the Bible.