You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.

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.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

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

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

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.

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.