Which means writing as cure. Not completely, of course. You never get over your parents in the hospital or your best love in the grave. I won’t use the word “therapy,” it’s too clean, too sterile a word. I only say when death slows others, you must leap to set up your diving board and dive head first into your typewriter. The poets and artists of

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.

His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself.

Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.

A sense of inferiority, then, in a person, quite often means true inferiority in a craft through simple lack of experience.

The photographs so enraged me I ran, did not walk, to my machine and wrote “Sun and Shadow,”

To fail is to give up.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting