“My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.”

“Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.”

“The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.”

“The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.”

“This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.”

“Art educates. That's why writers must know life. . .If the writer knows life, his work is often progressive, even though his own consciousness may lag behind.”