I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true.
It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.