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

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.