
Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
Letters and interviews
Building the Mote in God’s Eye (with Jerry Pournelle) (p. 442)
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)
Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
Letters and interviews
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
Source: Flaubert's Parrot
Source: I. Asimov
“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“Writers are as jealous as pigeons.”
Letter to I.L. Leontev (February 4, 1888)
Letters
“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”
As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
General sources
My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)
As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne (1984)
Context: Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.