Malcolm Cowley quotes:

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

Put cotton in your ears and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant old age.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.

Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens.

Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens

Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

I never cease to be amazed why some of my friends became famous and others, just as talented, didn't. I've come to suspect it's a matter of wanting fame or not, and those who don't want it, don't get it.

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him.

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized.

Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down

Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.