You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

No one you love is ever truly lost.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.