“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

“Tomorrow, is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.”

“The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed”

“There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don't care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody. I feel that I'm lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change.”

“Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. […] If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.”

“This is a book by a writer who does some teaching, not a book by a teacher who does some writing, and one of the satisfactions of the craft is that there's always something new to learn.”

“All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.”

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”