Quotes About Author

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life. Read more at

Those are the five writing tips: Avoid clichés, avoid generalisations, find your own voice, show compassion, and ask the important questions.

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

Our age has need of violence, he writes. And he is violence.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

I guess I am disturbed only because so little strains through the meshes and I am thinking in such violent floods.

Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.

then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

Just that divine understanding and unique responsiveness and clairvoyance, the match to my mind.

So many Anaïses you have shown me—and now this one—as if to prove your protean versatility.

I realized that for me it is only and always the "literary" appeal that people and places make. The reality is void of interest. Flat.

Para un escritor, un personaje es un ser con quien no se siente ligado por el sentimiento. El verdadero amor destruye la «literatura». Por eso, también, Henry no puede escribir sobre mí, y quizá nunca escriba sobre mí —por lo menos, hasta que nuestro amor se acabe y, entonces, yo me convierta en un «personaje», es decir, en una personalidad alejada, no fundida con él.

To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction.

Now Geroge had a weakness in common with many men; when he was in an expansive mood, he loved to recount his exploits.

And oh, someday, what a treat you will have when you read Thiess . . . Frank Thiess.

I refer to all you write about Cocteau, [Eugene] Jolas & Goethe—with the changefulness of tone, the mockery of the "pomp" in the next paragraph.)

the writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement.

But in 1928 she had inexplicably, confusingly fallen in love. The man who triggered this upheaval was John Erskine, best-selling American author of such books as The Private Life of Helen of Troy and a renowned pianist.

Call me up as soon as you find time to come, or we can meet in Paris and have a talk. Next week almost every afternoon I'm posing for a Russian painter in Montparnasse.

Can you read this ink, made of distilled Andalusian blood?

are the only woman who has had a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance—no more, you seem to urge me to betray you.

What a powerful duet! What a mixture of significant irrelevancies, illuminating incongruities! [. . .]