Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.