One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets
Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story.
I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer. That’s as sincere a thing as I’ve ever said.
A writer’s job is courage. You’ve got to be as honest as you can.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets.
Writing is a lonely job.
You’re not really alone when you are writing and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.
I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out it was called science fiction.
Every great or even very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications ... It is his world and no other.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, of drinking, or looking on, or sex.
That is the mystery about writing, it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times when the heart is cut open.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
I would be so lonely on earth if I didn’t have the possibility and freedom to write. I will go to my grave changing a word. And there is always the absolutely right word.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice.
Even when I finish a book, I’m never sure whether it is good or rubbish.
I liked to watch the fights. Somehow it reminded me of writing. You needed the same thing, talent, guts and condition.
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
It’s assumed that in order to be a serious writer, you have to look like the back of a bus.
Every writer thinks he’s a good one.
Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.
Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed.