In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.