The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood