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

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

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.

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

In true courage there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish, and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.

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

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