Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

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.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.