Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

I'm tired of everybody. Please forgive me.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.