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Courtesy of writerswrite.co.za A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
- The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
- I don’t think even the most conscientious and astute teachers can teach anything about style. Style comes only after long, hard practice and writing.
- Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
- Reading … the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
- Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word—life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.
