The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.