“In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.”

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.

I think people underestimate the value of collaboration, especially for writers.

Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer,

When I use the term “complex realism”, what I’m suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature.

I don’t consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years.

I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.