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The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me wi...more

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Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

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Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

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Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

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The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

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The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

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Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

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T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able t...more

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T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

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A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no ...more

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Write what you know.

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In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their o...more

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Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of...more

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Loose and forbear!

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I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so t...more