I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied…

I am right now in the middle of a difficult writing project. And it's just as difficult now as when I started. But when I get up in the morning I am really qua…

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors - somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating - non…

And so I penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.

I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it - a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world ful…

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde f…