Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Maxwell Perkins

I do not think you should read about writing while you are writing.

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

It often puzzles me when people think that matters connected with sex ought to be suppressed. Sex itself cannot be suppressed, and the efforts to do it, it seems to me, result in greater damage than it can do itself. After all, it was not an invention of man, but of God.

Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don't put too much trust in them.

Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.

What we publishers think is that our function is to bring everything out into the open, on the theory that we have an adult population that knows values, or can learn them, and let them decide.

Learn about writing from reading. That is the right way to do it.

Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.

Writing, like drawing is an art, and whatever conveys the meaning is justified.

I do not think anyone can read War and Peace too much. I read it six times.

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.

It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write of some particular day, he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt, and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it, they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense, but that ability is at the bottom of writing, I am sure.

You are all right on time, except for the fact that time is the enemy of us all, and especially of the writer.

For real self esteem is not derived from the great things you've done, the things you won. The mark you've made - but an appreciation of yourself for what you are.

Of the whole public not a handful can understand the artist's point of view or the writer's conscience.

The book belongs to the author.