The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.

Many people say they want to write a book but very few do it.

When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway — in secret.

« Un grand écrivain se remarque au nombre de pages qu'il ne publie pas. »

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.

I want to write books that only those who read them claim they did.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Here it is interesting to remark that if at the present time you were to ask any of the beings there about this writer, he would certainly recognize his name and speak of him as an extraordinary being. “But if you went on to ask what he had written, it would turn out that most of them, if of course they confessed the truth, had never read a single one of his books. “All the same they would talk about him and discuss him, and splutteringly insist that he was a being with an unparalleled mind and a phenomenal knowledge of the psyche of the beings dwelling on the planet Earth.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count — there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book,