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

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

... 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.

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

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

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

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