Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.

For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

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.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.