"Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman."
- Nancy Banks-Smith
"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself."
- George Bernard Shaw
"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity."
"Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death."
- Edna Ferber
"Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style."
- Jonathan Swift
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it."
- Anais Nin
"A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat."
- Hugh MacLennan
"It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history."
- Renata Adler
"It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date."