The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter-'tis the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.

can only write about what bites you.

One does not consider style, because style is.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

A good writer always works at the impossible.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.

Don't ever tell a story like it wasn't about you.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say but what we are unable to say.

I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.