Sir, the fact that a book is in the public library brings no comfort. Books are the one element in which I am personally and nakedly acquisitive. If it weren't for the law I would steal them. If it weren't for my purse I would buy them.

Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and although I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

You know how it is in the kid's book world: It's just bunny eat bunny.

For I bless God in the libraries of the learned
and for all the booksellers in the world.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! ...To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

I am at heart a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

La lecture de tous les bons livres est comme une conversation avec les plus honnêtes gens des siècles passés.
(The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.)

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,
he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas.
(Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman,
have I ceased seeing your beard full of butterflies.)

An artist is his own fault.

Why does my muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy.

I myself am more and more inclined to agree with Omar and Satchel Paige as I grow older: Don't try to rewrite what the moving finger has writ, and don't ever look over your shoulder.

The blank page, difficult mirror,
gives back only what you were.

I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.