21 August (1972): Charles Bukowski to Patricia Connell
A relationship without love is comfortable because you are always in control if the other person loves you. But the one who is in love...
20 August (1959): Truman Capote to Gloria Vanderbilt
I feel that in most writing, but especially dramatic writing, fantasy, particularly psychological fantasy, must be framed with very realistic detail: otherwise it does not...
19 August (1942): Jean Grenier to Albert Camus
The wind is shifting and there is wisdom in waiting for the right opportunity.
16 August (1937): Veza Canetti to Georges Canetti
I beg you to tear up this letter at once. No document that gives access to Canetti's inmost being must be allowed to survive.
15 August (1951): Patrick White to Peggy Garland
Since the war I cannot find any point, see any future, love my fellow men; I have gone quite sour—and it is not possible, in...
14 August (1848): Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams
I regard Mr. Thackeray as the first of Modern Masters, as the legitimate High Priest of Truth; I study him accordingly with reverence: he—I see—keeps...
13 August (1960): Guy Debord to Maurice and Rob Wyckaert
So we have reached other continents, and await the next planets. CONGO FOR THE CONGOLESE! UNESCO FOR THE SITUATIONISTS!
12 August (1930): Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins
Have something over 40,000 words done. Have worked well 6 days of every week since got here. Have 6 more cases of beer good for...
9 August (1933): John Steinbeck to Carl Wilhelmson
I never had much ability for nor faith nor belief in realism. It is just a form of fantasy as nearly as I could...
8 August (1820): John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Indeed I should like to give up the matter at once—I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world which you are...
7 August (1918): William Carlos Williams to Amy Lowell
Perhaps I would not have written this letter had I not a knife in my hand.
6 August (1909): James Joyce to Nora Barnacle Joyce
My eyes are full of tears, tears of sorrow and mortification. My heart is full of bitterness and despair. I can see nothing but your...
5 August (1928): Cesare Pavese to Carlo Pinelli
Life being as it is now, a man can no more write in rhyme than he can go about wearing a wig and carrying a...
2 August (1947): Jane Bowles to Paul Bowles
I think there is no point in using the word talent any longer. Certainly Carson McCullers is as talented as Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir...
1 August (1871): George Sand to Gustave Flaubert
I awaken from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy and delirium tremens! Everything is possible at present.
31 July (1953): Malcolm Lowry to Albert Erskine
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...
30 July (1962): Evelyn Waugh to Daphne Fielding
It has always seemed to me as unnatural for two people to write a book together as for three people to have a baby.
29 July (1952): Randall Jarrell to Mary Von Schrader
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...
26 July (1944): Maxwell Perkins to Joseph Stanley Pennell
The trouble with reviewers, and with editors, is so simple that nobody gets it.
25 July (1916): Eugene O'Neill to Beatrice Ashe
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...
24 July (1921): Edna St. Vincent Millay to Norma Millay
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...
23 July (1931): Sherwood Anderson to John Anderson
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...
22 July (1946): Thomas Mann to Hans Friedrich Blunck
A man of letters, a creative writer, ought to know that although life allows all sorts of things, it stops short at absolute immorality.
19 July (1949): Alice B. Toklas to L. Elizabeth Hansen
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...
