Es imposible escribir la verdadera historia de la vida de una persona. Supera el poder de la literatura. El relato completo de cualquier vida sería absolutamente aburrido además de absolutamente increíble.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.

It's always difficult playing real people, because people have a notion of what they should be or how they should be played.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Me resulta complicado escribir sobre mi vida, porque no sè cuánto recuerdo y cuánto es producto de mi imaginación;la estricta verdad puede ser tediosa y por eso, sin darme ni cuenta, la cambio o la exagero, pero me he propuesto corregir ese defecto y mentir lo menos posible en el futuro.

I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

I find free verse very, very difficult to write.