Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.