Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.

You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.