in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.