For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.