Such a return trip through the forest to out house is physically impossible but it being equally impossible to explain to anyone how we lived we had to make it anyhow. I would still be making it but for Margie herself of course & a shining Christian deed rare in my experience which etemphasises how all ex-Consuls in the Lowry psyche should behave in future toward their fellow man & I hope will.
It has always seemed to me as unnatural for two people to write a book together as for three people to have a baby.
I think you and I had better burn our letters some Midsummer’s Eve when we’re about 102 and think we might die. People will be able to see the flames for miles.
The trouble with reviewers, and with editors, is so simple that nobody gets it.
How can comprehension be born without a multitudinous experience? You must come out and scratch and bite, and love and hate, and play and sing and fly, and earn your place in the sun.
Yes, once I was a child, and I played a mean trick on you, dear. I stuffed your mouth full of geranium leaves and sought earnestly to suffocate you. I am glad I did not succeed. Because you are a very amusing young woman, and deserve to live.
I get a long story started and sometimes it breaks in two. Some minor character comes in, as though a stranger had suddenly walked into a house. That changes everything.
A man of letters, a creative writer, ought to know that although life allows all sorts of things, it stops short at absolute immorality.
Of course writers write with their eyes painters paint with their ears. And further neither painters nor writers have ever been painted with their mouths open.
The women stop at home all day, doing the housework, drudging, and leading the most homely and I should say joyless lives. I fancy they never look at a book, and all their conversation is about their pots and pans…
