Life is a tragedy full of joy.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.