I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.