You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

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.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.