Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.