Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.