When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.