Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

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.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word

... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.