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

A writer is like a Gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer, he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him. The minute anyone knows any bureaucracy well enough, he will hate it. Because the minute it passes a certain size it must be unjust.

There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism.
Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

A real writer [...] doesn't look up to any other writer but himself.

There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.

Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much.

Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.

The only good writer was a dead writer.

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.