“(Jack London)“He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten.”

“No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.”

“It is wonderful, for almost all his actions may be traced to pride;-and pride has often been his best friend.”

“this has been a birthday best forgotten.”“Most birthdays are, milord,” his man said agreeably”

“Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are, therefore, not about 'real life,' which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action-adventure, unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes, and they are, therefore, not solid.”

“If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?”