When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.

Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.