My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.