I’ve always had a feeling it’s dangerous to be friends with a writer.… you can end up talking away your books.

Norman Mailer

The fewer writers you know the better.

Maeve Brennan

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

Edward Hoagland

IN 1967, when I was twenty, I wrote an—inevitably—earnest first novel. I showed my efforts to the only published writer I knew. He was kind enough to write a long critique, a largely charitable assessment in which he expounded upon the challenges of first person narration, the difficulties of the picaresque style, and the need for consistency in fictional point of view. He allowed that some of my characters were effective, was indulgent with my attempts at plot development, and even went so far as to say, “the thing as a whole is rather likable.” But, at the end of his commentary, he appended this postscript: “It has just occurred to me that there is, however, the dreadful possibility that your book is supposed to be serious.”

P. J. O’Rourke

Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

George Bernard Shaw

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer’s love for another writer is never quite free of malice.

Anatole Broyard

BEST ADVICE I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: “Learn English. French is dead.”

Andrei Codrescu

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other’s prose.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude—and now and then a piece of red meat.

Henry Miller

For Christ sake write and don’t worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.

Ernest Hemingway,
IN A LETTER TO F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

After suggesting [that young writers] look into The Writer’s Chapbook I recommend they keep a diary, at least a page a day, and faithfully, and also to get into the habit of letter writing to other writers. The advantages that come with doing this seem obvious—both are exercises which hone the communicative skills.

George Plimpton

I WAS Sinclair Lewis’s secretary-chess-opponent-chauffeur-protégé back when I was 24, and he told me sternly that if I could be anything else be it, but if I HAD to be a writer, I might make it. He also said, as he threw away the first 75 expository pages of my first novel: “People read fiction for emotion—not information.”

Barnaby Conrad

There are other writers who would persuade you not to go on, that everything is nonsense, that you should kill yourself. They, of course, go on to write another book while you have killed yourself.

John Gardner