The Author's Craft Quotes

“The artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“There may be something of the amateur in all great artists.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft