Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 28
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: I'm going to ask you something. If I do get killed, and I honestly don't see how I can help it, I want you to write that book we were thinking about when I enlisted. If I get it, it's a cinch I won't be able to do it, and it would make me feel a whole lot better to know that if not my name and hand, at least, the thot of me would be passed on and not forgotten entirely. You know, sort of put into the book the promise that I had and the things I might have written so at least the knowledge of talent wasted won't be lost... If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.
“All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.”
Interview in The Paris Review, Issue #13 http://books.google.com/books?id=iZt6sBaHemQC&q="all+those+writers+who+write+about+their+childhood+gentle+god+if+i+wrote+about+mine+you+wouldn't+sit+in+the+same+room+with+me"&pg=PA8#v=onepage (Summer 1956)
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Dorothy Parker 172
American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist 1893–1967Related quotes

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15195588 All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)

Preface to Lear (1972; London: Methuen, 1983) p. lvii

“Those writings of mine aren't anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.”
Excerpt of meeting with Nixon 1972, quoted in The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Road_to_War/SDb3PSD__KwC?hl=en&gbpv=0 (May 9, 2013) by Marvin Kalb
1970s

As quoted in "The Michener Phenomenon" by Caryn James in The New York Times (8 September 1985)
"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)

On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)