He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. … The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted

Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.