We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati – those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political – especially that which pretends not to be.
Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism – a Mongoloid metaphysic.
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author’s book.
Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands – Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love – and most of all, an audience!
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you’ve lived.
My own best books have not been published. In fact, they’ve not even been written yet.
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.