... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficien...t, philanthropic self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I h...ave attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That's why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It's clean, it's relaxing, it doesn't squirt juice all over... Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face Is a stranger and no one can tell you it's true. Hey, stupid!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed de...ep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Ri...viera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too fa...mous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping t...he turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed--confound 'em!--is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up--so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers--as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... ...One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over t...he water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your appro...aching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »