You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer
My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75
Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form
The writer works in a lonely way.
Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing
Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written
I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it
The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Literature is the best way to overcome death.
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger.