“Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.”

“When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”

“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”

“It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.”

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

“If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.”

“I know what he means: the taste of language that is only spoken and never written because the speaker most likely doesn't read or write. My father has it, too.”

“It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.”

“The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.”

“I hate it when something I’ve had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.”