Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

Be bold, free, and truthful.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

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.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

I readan article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children tobe skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.

The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.