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.

…it is dangerous for one who lets himself be fascinated by the great dark mirrors that poetry and madness wield at the bottom of their chasms.