After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

The aspiring writer must not merely be persistent, but relentless. If you are persistent and your manuscript is rejected, you send it out again. But if you are relentless, you make ten copies of the rejected manuscript and send them all out simultaneously.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

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 famous.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.