Beware of a man with manners.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.