Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.

As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.

If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands. One cannot love while holding offensive arms.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

The cliche is dead poetry.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate the husband the landscape.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values; that is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

Here is a city built in a wilderness. Philip II chose the site for no other reason than that it was the geographic centre of Spain.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!